Steve Ballmer is set to make $1 billion a year for doing nothing | CNN Business
3 years ago by Maëlys to c/aboringdystopia
That's 100k for those in the back. Really puts this greed into perspective, there is absolutely no reason for any individual to be hoarding this much money. For many people that would literally be life changing
It’s a mental disorder, similar to hoarding, and they all need psychological help.
And the saddest thing about it is that a lot of people admire it.
Loads of people admire people with anorexia and bulimia, doesn’t change that there is something wrong with their brain.
If you want to stretch it a little further, this would be enough to very comfortably support just shy of 74,000 students in Australia per year.
That's roughly an extra third of what our government offers right now.
This is exactly why you do a progressive tax rate that charges a huge percent (50+) for every penny earned over 20 million.
They can still get these massive bonuses, but get would be better off putting that money into wages that aren’t taxed so much.
50% for 20 million sounds insane to me. I'd be clamoring for 75% or more. I'm in Ontario and people making something like 250000 CAD already have a marginal rate above 50% IIRC. Before anyone calls me a lazy commie, my marginal rate is in the mid 40s already, and I'm happy to do my part.
Oh honey, that's so much more conservative than I'd tax. 100% over a million, easy.
They don't deserve huge bonuses so I'm not interested in letting them keep anything that insane. There should be a cap on income based upon the median wage or something IMO.
The UK tax bands will blow your mind.
Like 40% for anything over 50k. Which I'm fine with btw.
Ok, so capital gains tax then. It still kicks in at a fairly early point. Long before you're making millions.
Anybody else think there should be a money limit? Like at a certain point you get a message: Congratulations, you completed capitalism. Now every additional cent you make is going to be taxed at 100%
Developers developers developers developers
One of the only public statements he was right about.
YEEEEAAAAAAARRERRGGGGGGGHHHHH!!
Okay, that too.
Billionaires gonna billionaire.
"Hustle and grind bro. Get that bread"
It doesn't matter if you hustle and bring every single day for the rest of your life, you will never have a billion dollars.
But giving someone at the bare minimum support from the state is apparently setting the wrong incentive. They say free money for doing nothing is communism and makes people lazy while giving a billinaire billlions for doing nothing is late capitalist doublespeak. I hope he suffocates on it.
This is free money in the way that it's a return on his investment. This has nothing to do with the state other than they will collect tax revenue on this distribution annually.
This should be a motivational post to get people investing. heck of a retirement payout this guy's getting.
This should be a motivational post to get people investing.
Totally, because people who are struggling just love to take risks with their money.
What risk? Market goes up, the Rich ain't gonna let that stop so you may as well catch on the coat tails.
Past performance is not indicative of future earnings. Consult an investment professional or just send me your banking details. Same same.
DECAPITATORS DECAPITATORS DECAPITATORS!
If you made $61k per day for a 45 year career, you would make ~$1bn.
So, that's like a decent yearly salary PER DAY, from the age of 20 to the age of 65.
If $61k per year can support someone for a year, that career would support 365 people for 45 years.
And that's just $1bn over a full career.
If you earned $1bn per year, that could support 16,425 per year on a $61k salary. Thats a town of people.
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lol
The CEO of Brave is a would-be Ballmer; he uses his wealth to fight against gay rights.
He was also an anti-masker.
Stop protecting yourself and let us protect you.
Ballmer further ruined Microsoft and gets rewarded. Gotta love capitalism
ITT: a bunch of people who don't understand how dividends work on stock ownership. He's not collecting a salary, Microsoft is not actively paying him, he's just an investor who owns a shit ton of stock.
Or, a bunch of people who are over the inequality in our world regardless of how the person comes by the money.
I don’t care if Microsoft pays him a salary or not, hoarding that much wealth is a mental illness that can only be cured by a guillotine
is a mental illness that can only be cured by a guillotine
Do you prescribe this medicine to all mental illness?
Billionaires don't want to work anymore.
Somebody should've just told Marx about the difference between salary and capital ownership!
No need, they exist and you've already lost...
Rape already exists. Based on your reasoning here, anyone who says rape shouldn't exist 'already lost.' So I guess we should get rid of those anti-rape laws, right?
So you're saying he'll be making a billion dollars a year for doing nothing?
Income is income, and billionaires already have too much of it. Not everyone enjoys taking it rough from corporate America.
The only people who should have stake in a company are those who work there.
The stock market is perverse.
It is supposed to be a tool that allows people to support promising ventures that they believe in, and allows them to profit from the venture if it is successful.
Instead it's a race to the bottom, where companies have a feduciary duty to their investors to make them as much profit as possible. This is the ultimate driver of enshittification.
Adam Smith was a smart guy, but he never saw Milton Friedman coming.
He’s always been a tool
The guy was just Bill Gates' roommate. He's white privilege personified.
Well, to be fair, the man is very good at nothing.
He won’t be doing nothing; he’ll be doing tons of cocaine. He actually has enough money now to attach 3 or 4 more functioning noses to his face.
This is perfectly fine, but an extreme wealth tax would be wrong.
If it keeps him doing nothing, it might actually be worth it...
Go Steve! It’s your payday!
See this is the problem here. We have these insane examples of wealth that should really have been fixed with a 100% tax rate over something reasonable. But since we didn't do that we have the other extremes, calling for tearing down other streams of income or demanding you should work the rest of your life for a wage vs investments. Neither of these positions offer much value here. Really we should be pushing for voters to turn out and create a reasonable tax rate. Take WA for example and how they created a 7% tax on over 250k annual for capital gains. Could that be more? Maybe. Could it be a sliding scale up? Sadly no due to the state constitution atm. As an engineer there I might be in a position that pays that, which I'm OK with, but no way I could buy a house here or live comfortably without working if there's no investment income allowed. And I don't really want to spend the rest of my life working for shitty tech companies.
well played.
Yeah great job being the college roommate of a future monopolist, we all should have picked parents like his.
Um.... This article is clickbait. It's like If I invested super early at AAPL(Apple) and now have a billion dollars in Apple shares. Sure, I'm a billionaire, it doesn't mean I didn't do anything to get it.
Stupid article.
Ah yes the classic "providing capital doesn't count" How do you imagine businesses should get initial funding if not via investors? And how much should a person/corporation be allowed to profit from that initial funding?
If they didn't hold the capital hostage from the doers of the world, laborers, as is the point of capitalism, it would be a lot easier.
Instead the do nothing capitalists keep the vast majority of the value generated, and provide just enough for the people that made it to subsist. It's a shame so many they would never let within 100 feet of their clubs, towers, or compounds defend their con.
Not surprising though, we're propagandized through the media they own and the curriculum they influence to deify the con-game that is capitalism. We were conquered by the contemporaries of the traveling snake oil salesmen of old.
Sorry what's your alternative? I'm guessing communism?
In that system how do you efficiently allocate capital? Do you use a command economy?
I'm not deifying anything, it just seems that capitalism is the most efficient economic system we can come up with. And combined with regulation seems to produce pretty good results, see most of the better parts of Europe for example
Not GP, but I'd love to see them replaced entirely with crowdfunding. So the public would pay based on our expected benefit from new structures, instead of paying people who own structures. Much of the initial investment is just paying off someone else's mature investment.
Rather than just capping profits with a number, we should be addressing the problems that cause it to exist at all. We're already voting on people who vote on bailouts; might as well just cut out the middlemen who "provide" capital.
How would you crowd fund a company that isn't promising a specific set of products? Normally the way we do crowd funding is to offer essentially a pre sale of a product. Sure sometimes people just put forward cash because they really want the product to exist but it isn't the norm But for a company that will be a service provider what incentive exists to fork over potentially millions of dollars? In a crowd funding scheme you expect no profit share so why would you invest in them?
Compared to in this case buying a percentage of a company early on to provide them with capital on the basis that you may make money in the future
Also those bailouts while somewhat distasteful were played back to the government with interest
The only things that warrant investors profiting off their investment at all are the risk of not getting the money back and the opportunity cost of not having the money for other things while it is tied up in the investment so I would say a reasonable profit would be somewhere in the order of magnitude of those and not in the current "infinitely for all time" order of magnitude.
How are you possibly measuring opportunity cost? This is the opportunity. All you can do is use it to buy goods and services or invest via lending in some form
Say you could quantify that and cap profits. What should happen with corporate profits then? After you've "paid" the original investors? Does the owner of the company now reabsorb their shares? And if we instead allocate profits to the workers, do we also allocate losses? Do workers just straight up not get paid if the company loses money one year?
What amount of capital has Ballmer provided? Please give us a number in dollars. You can round it off.
Also, what amount of capital would not be provided if Ballmer didn't increase his wealth by $1 billion off of it? Again, you can round it off.
Actually quite interesting in the case of Ballmer as he was an employee compensated via stock rather than straight up cash
You'd consider that an investment as he was investing his time to be a business manager while being compensated probably less in cash that would be normal for the position
So as early Microsoft didn't have the cash on hand, or didn't want to give up that cash they could use elsewhere they gave equity as compensation
How do you suggest we should remove this situation? Should we not allow compensation in the form of equity? Or should ownership of equity not exist generally?
Ballmer also got Microsoft their first major contract back in the day. He did contribute massively to what MS is today. To that dollar value? No, no one contributes THAT MUCH. But it's not like he wasn't extremely impactful.
I am shocked that an OG Silicon Valley business owner and right hand man of the creator of the most popular software on the planet is till taking his cut of the shares. SHOCKED!
Doing nothing 🤦♂️
Labor keeps the world running. Labor makes the discoveries. Labor invents.
Capitalism just holds the resources hostage from labor, allowing access to ill gotten resources in exchange for almost everything they produce, rinse and repeat.
You swoon over con-men.
I’m not fully abreast of Ballmer’s dealings, but I know he’s spending a shit ton on pro basketball:
One can judge the utility of such ventures, but it’s undeniable that capital is being used (not held hostage) and jobs being created. It takes a lot of people to build a stadium.
Microsoft laid off 16,000 people in 2023 alone. How many pro basketball jobs did he create in return?
Ballmer’s not on either of those lists. Not sure how you can put those layoffs on him.
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That's a great salary even if divided between 10,000 people.
Fuck billionaires, leeches
save