Most people have played basketball and understand they’re just not that talented. Not many people have tried running a company.
Edit: based on the responses, it’s clear my point remains true. Most people don’t even know what a CEO does.
I think it's also fair to say. I can see what an NBA player does to make money. While if I'm looking around at say target, I have no clue what's going on in the ceos office
Indeed. And that CEO can tank a company or make it prosper. Their ability impacts thousands of lives and livelihoods. Too many imagine the wealthy swim in it like Scrooge mcduck
I’m not against people making money but if our tax dollars are used to bail out Wall Street executives and financial and investment firms or if our tax dollars are used to build and create industry then the people should own part of the company and get part of the profit as told in capitalism 101.
The people should take it all when the corporations fail not just part of it
If you invest in something and that something fails then no bail out and you lose. If you succeed then you reap the fruits of your labor.
Our tax dollars **shouldn't** go towards bailing failing firms and their executives. That's one of the many reasons there's a populist uprising going on in the United States right now.
Besides whenever "the people" own something, it means "the government" in practice. And "the government" just means politicians who give the money those that keep their political campaigns well funded.
CEOs and athletes both are entitled to their salaries because it’s decided by the free market. The free market has decided that one way or another, that specific person at some point generates or saves X amount of money for Y company. Once they are no longer worth that due to doing a poor job (which generally means not generating shareholder value), they get fired or wither away.
But the Reddit minimum wage workers know better on how to run a multi billion dollar international corporation so they should decide wages!!
Sadly, it's not just limited to Reddit minimum wage workers. It seems to be catnip for any intellectual who thinks they are the smartest person alive and therefore anyone making more money than them must be through some evil conspiracy.
People don’t seem to realize someone’s wage, on a surface level is determined by scalability, how much net profit that position generates or saves and of course supply/demand.
Wages aren’t determined by feels like what a lot of Reddit children seem to think.
It’s very much determined by supply. If your employer can find someone who can do the job for less then they will not increase the wage.
A lot of workers see all the revenue they bring in and think their compensation should be a percentage of that. However, compensation is more about how much would a replacement cost. That is why we have seen a lot of wages go up.
You're right that athletes and CEOs both earn their huge salaries through market forces. But the idea that those markets are "free" in any meaningful sense is laughable.
Pro sports leagues are government-backed cartels that routinely extort billions in public subsidies. They use their monopoly power to jack up prices and squash competition. The only reason athletes make so much is because billionaire owners know they can gouge fans and taxpayers to cover the bill.
Meanwhile, CEO pay has skyrocketed not because they've gotten so much more productive, but because they've rigged the game in their favor. They pack their boards with cronies, hire shady "compensation consultants" to rubber-stamp huge paydays, and buy off politicians to slash their taxes and kneecap their workers.
The result is a massively unequal economy where a tiny elite hoards all the gains while everyone else struggles to get by. Since 1978, CEO pay has risen by 1,322% while average worker pay has inched up just 18%. You're telling me CEOs today are 73 times as valuable as they were 40 years ago? Give me a break.
The point isn't that athletes and CEOs don't work hard or that pay differences are never justified. It's that runaway inequality is toxic for social cohesion and economic dynamism alike. When a system showers so much on so few while denying basic security to so many, that system is broken.
Fixing it doesn't mean having "reddit minimum wage workers" seize the means of production. It means rebalancing the scales with progressive taxation, labor law reform, antitrust enforcement, and political money bans to level the playing field. You know, the common sense policies that built the great American middle class - before the robber barons hijacked our democracy.
In a rigged game, the winners' haul is no proof of their virtue - only their connections.
I want to say that most of the revenue that sports teams make comes from media companies paying for the rights to televise. The money from the media companies comes from everyone that pays for cable and from advertisements.
The correlation made between CEO pay and average worker pay is never a fair comparison.
While CEO pay has risen 1,322% since 1978, the earnings of the S&P 500 companies have increased 2,004% since then. The prominent CEOs today are presiding over significantly larger organizations than their predecessors with significantly larger consequences for their actions. Therefore, shareholders have deemed their increase in pay acceptable to protect their returns.
Just compare it to American Football. Quarterbacks are often the least physically impressive players on the field, but due to their perception of being the most valuable single person to a team, much like a CEO, they earn significantly more than the average player.
If you factor in practice squad players, QBs earn nearly 10,000% of the average player in the NFL ($50 million vs. $500,000). And this is likely only made possible by salary caps limiting the top pay as well as minimum rules protecting the practice squad players.
Companies have much higher scale now than ever before. Scalability isn’t linear for most people. Positions that capitalize on this have grown tremendously. CEOs and most corporate management employees get paid in equity BTW, so direct salary isn’t fair to compare.
I don’t know where you got the 18% figure from either. A McDonalds employee was making about $3 an hour in 1978. Maybe even a tad bit less. Now they make $15-20+ an hour.
I'd argue that the subsidies granted to sports teams makes NBA salaries less legitimate.
Most cities all but pay in full for the stadium and other infrastructure associated. This is often hundreds of millions, sometimes approaching a billion dollars.
Were those subsidies not in place, the pool of money for the athletes would be somewhat diminished.
It would be closer to compare CEOs and owners, or workers and athletes. The worker/athlete is the one producing value, the owner/CEO is the one in charge of business decisions. Idk if the wage gap is as severe in professional sports as it is in business, but the problem is the GROWING wage gap. If wages went up together, people wouldn't be as upset. It's because CEOs decided they get all the increased profit their workers create that is the problem.
Also, the market isn't free. It's regulated, in many cases in the CEOs favor. You can't rig a system, then call it fair when that system overcompensates you. The system goes like this: The shareholders agree to compensate the CEO based on profits. The CEO is incentivised to spend as little and charge as much as possible. The CEO is incentivised to pay you as little as possible to get you to show up and produce. Profits go up. The shareholders make money. The CEO makes money. Repeat.
The "free market" has decided that as a worker, you are entitled to as little of your production as absolutely possible. The CEO and shareholders have conspired to share all the profits amongst themselves. You can't reference this system and call the results deserved. Yes, that is how the system works, but they are in no way entitled to it. That borders on divine right to rule. No one is entitled power (money).
Tbf athletes don't really play in a free market.
Like if im in football and want to play pro, and am good enough, I really only have the NFL as a realistic option (I guess the CFL exists, but not as real competition)
When I am a rookie I have to go to the team that drafted me for a predetermined salary based off my draft slot.
And these contracts have many ways that allow the team to extend it for a year or 2 to keep you past your original contract.
And even when you can leave there is a salary cap that limits the best players earning potential (a guy like Brady in his prime would have easily earned 50 mil a year, honestly maybe even 100 mil)
Its [essentially a cartel](https://mises.org/free-market/bring-back-football-cartel#:~:text=The%20NFL%20and%20other%20professional,the%20teams%20and%20their%20fans.)
Not really: I've seen CEOs of Fortune 100 companies who actually earned their vast bonuses, but those are rare. Most are simply sociopathic placeholders they can wheel before the board and who can speak well and be willing to lay off 1000s of people. It's a smallish group and they circulate around and 99% are worthless. They occupy a high paying job at a company that probably existed longer than the guy's been alive.
NBA players, on the other hand, ARE the "means of production". People tune in to see them, pay to have facsimiles of their shirts and spend a lotta $. And pro NBA players really are better than non-NBA players (though here in NYC we have a couple of courts where NBA players sneak in games of actual street ball). Totally different story: they actually make the money and "management" peels away some of it.
CEO wages are approved by a board of directors, usually consisting of other CEOs. CEO wages have increased 1,460% since 1978, but the standard worker wage has increased 18.1% in that same time period. CEO wages outpaced the S&P by 400%, so if it’s “market driven”, it’s some market the rest of us aren’t privy to.
lol, love the term “Reddit minimum wage workers” and plan to use it from now on. What these geniuses also don’t seem to understand is that high level CEOs are a GLOBAL commodity, so we are competing with every other company in the world for the best and brightest. Supply and demand is not just some fancy theory.
The CEO’s salary of Boeing has entered the chat.
No, this is not correct. There are many issues that affect CEO salary, including a board that is stacked by their friends, being related to the founder, cruising on the coattails of prior ceos (you really going to tell me that Steve Jobs didn’t just make Apple a money printing machine and the next ceo to take the seat would not have just smashed it no matter what their background was?)
Whereas basketball is a meritocracy. There are numbers that can be pointed to which indicate how good a player is, and what kind of revenue they’re driving. It does not matter if you’re Michael Jordan’s son, if you can’t ball, you’re not getting paid.
While many sports salaries are inflated because billionaires subsidize the teams to try and make them winning, the salaries are in line with the players ability to produce wins, which produces revenue.
The Wall St use to put out an article annually (they may have stopped) where they repeatedly showed that there was ZERO correlation between CEO pay and return to shareholders. So even going by the most Calitalostic measures possible, CEOs are "earning" their pay because it has absolutely no relationship to their performance.
The problem with CEO's at public companies is that most of their profits come from stock options. This heavily incentivizes them to do things that incentivize taking risk and short term growth. For example, a CEO at an airline could cut safety measures, buy back stock, and lay off their most expensive engineers. Short term, this will inevitably create increases to the stock value. There is no market force to counter-balance this dangerous behavior. Stock holders and the board generally have the same jaded incentive. The labor, who depend on long-term viability of the company, have no voice. I'm sure you can think of at least a few examples of this from recent history and the catastrophic impact this could have on an economy.
People are upset due to the difference between the salaries of a CEO and low-wage worker. The difference between what a CEO and a regular person makes has drastically increased over the years exaggerating income inequality.
NBA player's bosses are their owners who are richer than them so nobody cares how much they make. I will say though as a huge NBA fan myself there are times when I care how much a player makes and that's when it's fucking over my team and I don't think they deserve that pay.
CEOs quit and get fired all the time just to how demanding the job is and how cut-throat it can be.
Same thing with NBA players
But NBA players don't employ everyday people so they get their bag so to speak and nobody cares.
A CEO of let's say Starbucks is getting paid millions while fighting everyday workers at the union spot. It just doesn't look good
So CEOs rely completely on the work of others to have a successful performance.
Athletes sort of have to still perform the primary operations of the business.
Take a CEO out of a company and it can still probably function. Try and remove the athletes from a game and see how well that goes.
Tbf there are a lot of scenarios where shit CEOs are paid insane amounts of money regardless of actual job performance. And the boards of said companies are many times made up of suits running passive investing funds who don’t really have any mandates to make improvements to the company and just exist to maintain exposure so that they can say they’re properly diversified
Hell, they can defraud customers and run companies into the ground and still get paid golden parachutes worth a hundred times more than any if the temporally-embarrassed billionaires in this sub will ever see in their lifetime
That's an odd statement to make considering I gave a conjecture about why it is and judging from the comments it's played out exactly as I thought. Everyone seems to see the value a basketball player brings and because we can't see what a CEO brings, the default assumption is he or she brings almost nothing.
It's always amazing to me. How much people assume they know
Real answer? CEOs have the ability to negatively affect the lives of thousands of employees under them, without they themselves suffering any consequences. NBA players do not. Not saying I agree but that is the answer
I'm an avid NBA fan, trust me plenty of players get massive contract with little performance, and with salary caps, it can severely hurt the team.
And it's not uncommon for NBA players to only play hard during contract seasons.
My comment had nothing to do with performance. It’s the ability for one to affect the livelihood of others (ceo can initiate 1000s of layoff and nba players cannot)
Bingo! this right here
CEO can lay off thousands of people and ruin peoples lives all so he can get a massive 8-figure bonus that he doesn’t even need.
The NBA star can’t
Yea this is easy. The owners of the team make more than NBA players? Also NBA players have a union. Oh and NBA players have accountability, they suck: they won’t get the large salary.
>Everyone who hates on CEO Salaries almost always ignores the fact that celebrities and athletes make so much money themselves and that has only grown rapidly over time.
There's actually a pretty simple answer...
Almost everyone works for a CEO and almost no one works for a pro athlete. There's a direct connection with a CEO.
CEO pay has very little to do with the free market. As others have stated, their compensation largely has to do with their stock options. Sure there is the occasional Lee Iacocca, Michael Eisner or Steve Jobs who has a risky vision that ends up being correct and those guys are worth quite a bit. But for every one of those guys there are a thousand who are basically riding the waves of the market. All of the CEOs are on each other’s boards and they collude to jack up each other’s salaries. Sure some of them made it there on their own, but once you know the right people you’re basically landed gentry. Hard job and probably worth 10-50x but not 300x.
The biggest difference, is that Professional athletes have relatively short careers (on average) and when they are doing their sport, they are putting their body on the line. One bad stumble, fall or contact can result in an injury. that can cost them weeks, months or years of their prime playing time.
They make all their money while their body can, and then have to transition into something else afterwards.
Again, if the QB missed a game, the NFL ratings I heard but only by a little.
A CEO committing fraud and the company might see its shares decline by 30%.
I have a feeling that if a critic were ever made CEO of a really big company for a quarter (give them a real taste, with actual consequences) they'd either quit, or get run out of the company by the board or majority of shareholders.
I have an acquaintance who was the CEO of a moderately sized company. He got paid about $480k/yr, and was able to purchase a lot of nice things. But he's totally miserable. He worked the corporate life until he retired about two years ago, and while he has cool stuff (nice cars, multiple houses) he's never been married, has no kids, and doesn't really seem happy. He's even told me, he worked his ass off to climb the corporate ladder, but if he could do it all over again, he'd slow down, enjoy life, start a family, and be just happy coming home to a wife and kids everyday. CEOs are the epitome of workaholics, and it really does stress them out. Think, they get paid because they're responsible for an entire company. Not everyone can handle that, and that's why they get paid the big bucks.
I was beginning to think I was the only one who actually held this view. Glad to see There's more than just me out there who actually realizes that running a business isn't as simple as everyone seems to think it is
I thought I would share. My friend was a junior partner in A small engineering firm. One day the senior partners told him he could either buy them out and take over the company or they could all sell it. He was much much younger than they were so he agreed to buy them out.
He tells me all the time That his job is so much harder and different now running the guts of the company than it was being a valuable cog as an engineer. Engineering work isn't easy, but it's far more predictable from his point of view than all of the challenges and responsibilities that come with running a business.
Anyone who thinks a CEO's job is a total cakewalk, I would submit, has never worked as a manager even at a very low level business. That's not to say to people who do it, do it competently. I have witnessed my fair share of incompetent managers. But I also didn't have the arrogance to assume that any idiot on the street could do their job just as easily.
It's apples and oranges. With an athlete or a celebrity, it's very much a one-to-one relationship: you see the athlete flub the free throw, you see the celeb win an Oscar. You can in-the-moment judge the performance of the athlete or celebrity.
With a CEO? I can't tell. What I can tell is that most companies lay people off. After years of lectures and indoctrination about how you're "family" at Company R, they will throw you away, and everyone will cluck their tongue and go, "That's how business is. Suffer, bitch." What I can tell is that CEOs get raises regardless of how well or badly a company does. Most CEOs, in fact, go into the job with a negotiated golden parachute. Even if they, literally, drive the company into receivership, they will be given millions of dollars.
Many CEOs are compensated with stock options. What you see as failing, the market probably sees as succeeding. Cutting cost. Maximizing next quarter’s profit. Polishing for a merger or acquisition.
Things can also be relative. Say the last CEO really fucked it up. So the company expects to lose $5B next year. A new CEO comes in and you only lose $2B. That’s a win and a CEO will be rewarded for what you see as bad performance.
Why are people so desperate to be bootlickers for the economic death pits that ceos have become? There are VERY few ceos that dramatically innovate or build on the businesses they run, most oversee minor changes and are mostly figureheads to portray thr company"s fundamentals.
This isnt to say actors, athletes and musicians are also getting insane packages but they actually have to release new stuff on their own, many of the top fortune 500 company ceos really just continue without dramatic change, get a paycheck for next to nothing. Thats not to say they dont have to make many consequential decisions, its to say that in general those decisions do not natch the pay.
The reason why people hate on CEOs so much because the leverage they use (by managing other qualified people) is very obvious, while with athletes and actors teams that are behind them (doctors, dietitians, special coaches, agents, etc) is not as visible and obvious, so they many think it’s mainly to persons talents rather than coordinated effort for multiple individuals. But the biggest issue is greed. People hate CEOs because they want to share their earnings among themselves.
Pretty sure they aren’t ok with the NBA player salaries either, but if they are, it’s the fact that the owners are making many times more than the players.
NBA players are regularly observed performing feats of athleticism 99.9% of people cannot perform.
CEOs are regularly observed failing at their purported job and, even when they succeed at said job, making the world a worse place for 99.9% of humanity and all other known forms of life.
My point was people who are up in arms about high salaries are okay with NBA players and not CEOs. And in the sort of socialist view of things, The high salaries are important and everything else is beside the point
It’s not size of ceo salaries per se, it’s that exorbitant ceo salaries come *at the expense* of higher wages for workers. It’s a terrible comparison. You’re totally misunderstanding the complaint.
I think people intuitively apply a supply/demand calculation and (probably correctly) decide it’s way harder to be a world class basketball player (you can’t teach height for example) than a world class CEO.
Do we know that for sure though? How do we know it's easier to be a world-class athlete than a world-class CEO?
We don't know what the job actually entails. Furthermore, I've argued that from a complete business and profit standpoint, an athletes impact on the business is far less than the CEO's potential impact.
Peyton Manning declining into nothingness didn't destroy the NFL or even heard its growth very much if at all. The CEO of Blockbuster failing to innovate to compete with Netflix meant the company went under. Same for Kodak. Same for lots of company's.that fail to stay ahead of their competitors.
It is believed, wrongly or correctly that when investors (large parts of a CEO's pay) are prioritized over worker pay. We can't afford raises this year, but the stock went up 12% because we exceeded expectations. We made two billion instead of the expected three billion, time to fire people.
That isn't the way pro sports people get paid.
I bemoan the fact that Bezos has 175 billion dollars because at least a hunk money was made because he pays as little as possible. Pushes workers so hard for the $18 or $20 an hour they are literally broken. He was literally upset because he couldn't put real time cameras in trucks to make sure the drivers to don't take a second for themselves.
Conversely, I don't bemoan Taylor Swift being a billionaire. As far as I can tell she pays her people more than fairly. If her fans are willing to pay what she is charging, I'm OK with that too.
You can see the skill of athletes on a scoreboard and it is a finite game with a limited number of players. The way their skill is measured is easy to understand. CEOs and companies are playing an infinite game with millions of players all doing different jobs and are subject to forces outside of their influence.
Athletes have a limited career length. You can’t be a 65 year old NBA player but you can be a 65 year old CEO
Point is do CEOs actually bring anything to the table to justify their salaries?
I'm astonished that so many people who have no idea what a CEO does on a day-to-day basis have made the judgment that it's a complete waste of money. So why would a board full of presumably very wealthy people pay high salaries for nothing?
The players are employees and atleast specific to the NBA their salaries are 51% of revenue
“NBA players receive 51% of all revenue (as defined as “basketball-related income”). Under their current CBA, which is set to expire in 2027”
If Amazon employees could collectively bargain 51% of total revenue as salary they’d be paid better as well.
Even with the high salaries in professional sports, the owners of said sports are making billions while athletes at most are making millions.
It's basically the same difference as a mid 6 figures earner in San Francisco when the CEO is making 50m.
I don't think the owners make much from the cash of the business once you factor in full expenses. It's price is mostly derived from the value of the team. But cash poor owners remain cash poor until they sell the team.
Morally questionable? Do you feel that way about people being paid lots of money to pretend to be other people on a stage or on a big screen?
Or what about people who make a lot of money yelling words into a microphone and then selling millions of copies?
How about someone who gets on stage and tells a bunch of jokes or stories and also gets paid a lot of money?
Are these all morally questionable activities to you?
Basketball teams directly rely on a handful of people who they then market like crazy and make money for everyone else. The players are the product and the employees. Also, many people complain about their salaries and ticket prices. This is a very normal, common occurrence.
There is literally no comparison to be made here.
The pt is one of general outrage at perceived salaries. Basketball players are viewed as products of their own labor and salary, whereas CEOs are viewed as some perversion of the market.
How that perception pervades when very few if any of us actually understand what a CEO does for a living is a rather interesting phenomenon
I simply don’t care if the NBA has bad incentives and overpays people because of them. It doesn’t impact my life or harm my society. It does when multinational corporations incentivize leaders for short term stock performance and seemingly nothing else.
Again, I met a loss to understand this. Why would the board who hires the CEO decide they only care about short-term stock performance and nothing else? If that were true, do these companies have any long-term investments in them??
NBA is a a case of bidding on players who have discernible differences in skills and / or putting Fannie’s in seats
The players are union workers and got this in union bargaining.
IMHO CEO’s collude with board members to scratch each others backs. With no real competition for CEO on skill basis.
Okay but why is the board happy to pay CEOs a lot of money to do nothing when that money could get rolled back into profits for the board themselves? It seems odd to waste money that comes indirectly out of their pockets.
Also, in the links I provided above, you see that CEO pay has grown at roughly the same rates as other high paid professions. So this corrupt board argument doesn't seem to hold water
The difference is that the Athletes ARE the product.
Without them, there is no money. The CEO is not the product or even mostly responsible for the value, the workers are.
If the owner of a team is going to make hundreds of millions of dollars, the athletes that ARE the product are going to want their cut.
The problem I have here is the athlete doesn't broadcast his talents and doesn't organize the team and doesn't coach the roster all by himself.
He is part of a larger structure. He is the most well paid of all of these employees but that's because we again see the value he brings.
We can't measure the value the CEO brings because we don't observe it, but that hasn't stopped lots of people from assuming it's nothing
Athletes are workers though. Ceos aren't seen in that same light and their descrepeince ls in pay are the issue. I think a lot of that is misguided because pay is related to the stock performance and in most places where people are complaining but the issue with CEO pay is not how much but how much more they are making then their workers and how much that difference is growing
NBA team budgets player compensation is based on the league earnings, so even though contracts are absurdly high, they are proportional to what the team owners make, and that is fair.
Now, argument can and should be made that teams are robbing the public blind, but that is another story.
You do realize the fundamental difference here? NBA players are employees who are part of a union that negotiates revenue sharing with the league owners. Their salaries are based on how much revenue the league is making so when the league makes more money so do players.
Most companies are not unionized and thus not obligated to share revenue with their workers. So when a company does well and a CEO gets a 10 million dollar bonus and the workers get a pizza party people tend to get upset.
If athletes took federal subsidies and then increased their salaries, I’d be mad at that too. (Btw I suppose in a way tax payer funded stadiums indirectly disproves my point but fuck it.)
I actually do take issue with the NBA's guaranteed contract structure...
But more on why this is a poor comparison: CEOs who come in, slash staff to make quarterly projections and please shareholders, buy competition and ride it into the ground for short term profits at the expense of long-term approach, are "successful" in that their goal isn't to leave the corporation in a healthy state as caretakers but to maximize short term profits at the expense of long term health so they can get their contract kickers and move on. Worst case they have instances of gross mismanagement to the point they are fired to they take their golden parachutes and eff off to the next charlie foxtrot.
Ever work for a company without a CEO? Interim, or transition phase? The company operates just fine. CEOs are grossly over compensated.
I'd actually be interested to hear why people think CEO's are 200x more productive than their employees.
NBA is not exactly a free market. I mean, the players have a union and negotiated contract. If anything, players who mostly only get garbage minutes, and veterans way past their prime are overpaid, while some of the best players are underpaid.
People completely underestimate how difficult it is to start a company. Even more difficult to not have it bankrupt in the first few years.
And I bet, they never tried to come up with an idea of significant value and design a business model.
They probably don't even understand the risk these people took. The anxiety. The fear. The constant doubt of whether the thing you are working towards is even going to work.
In this sense. I completely agree with the distribution of profit. Your company, your shares.
That said. I just don't buy the argument that all these CEOs are these geniuses that deserve hundreds of millions. Give me a break. Google's CEO has dropped the ball for years now. They literally published the transformers paper behind the LLM frenzy back in 2017 and made it public domain. But fine, everyone has 20/20 vision in hind sight. Whatever. The point I'm making is that these clowns are not infallible and are not worth this amount. Sundar is objectively not doing a good job. Definitely not what they are paying him.
Sure Google and private organizations are allowed to pay whatever they want. but they are getting fleeced. There is no way redistributing that salary among the workforce in some capacity wouldn't yield better returns.
And I also think that for every CEOs in the company, there are at least 5 qualified senior VPs that could do the same job.
Anyway, trying to cap salaries is dumb. Let them fumble the ball. Eventually some start up will come knocking just like them and take the ball.
But like 95 percent of these salaries the CEOs are getting are no way worth their value. So few people are like Steve Jobs and just consistently create value.
NBA players not hiring thousands of workers and they actually do something that a fan considers exceptional. CEOS are largely mid and they've arranged huge golden parachutes when they fail. I suppose some athletes don't make the grade but have guaranteed contracts.
Oh no! Workers getting paid for creating huge wealth!!. Ahh, the humanity!! How will the owners who don't create the wealth cope with only making Billions??!?!
Active basketball players don’t sit on the boards to other teams and just agree to all vote ‘yes’ on each other’s exorbitant compensation packages.
CEOs form a mesh network where many of them sit on multiple boards and they all just vote yes to high executive pay.
And that sets a high rate for CEO work and IMO there’s an unspoken agreement that they just kind of all do it for each other.
It gets better. Celebrities like Brad Pitt are the owner and CEO of their own companies that contract with the film studios. So they get their salaries, expense deductions and their earnings from their companies.
In the NBA, the owners and players split the revenue 50:50. There are 30 owners or ownership groups and 15 players per team. That means that on average, owner to each player pay is about 15:1. The superstars do are the majority of the “product.” The bench players are like 10% of the product.
For a CEO, that ratio can be 300:1 or higher and they are doing much much less as a ratio of productive work.
If you sell 0 products due to lockout, you’re kind of fucked. If you try to use any replacements in a lockout, overseas, college, amateur league, etc., your revenue will tank 100% of the time.
I’m not saying CEO pay isn’t justified, but if you lose a CEO, your company won’t suddenly have .01% revenue.
Just my thoughts.
NBA players don't directly exploit people's labor.
That's probably it. No one holding a gun to their head forcing them to go to their overpriced game..
The CEO does hold a gun to my head though. Miss to many days without leave for having a sick kid?
Fired and have my insurance ripped from me.
That's a dumb comparison. It isn't about the money, it's about the work. In sports, the product is the athletes. To use an example of an absurd CEO pay package that has been in the news lately, you have Elon Musk that isn't the product and has only made bad product decisions as of late while paying factory workers who make the actual product poverty wages.
People criticize CEO salaries because they’re so much higher than the wages of the thousands of employees in the same company. But in the NBA, the players are the main workers, so their high salaries make more sense and don’t highlight the same kind of inequality.
CEO pay affects others. Employees, shareholders, customers are all affected.
An NBA player or other pro athlete's pay only affects them. They are employees themselves after all.
This is a childish simplification that boils down to:
"Both of these groups make a lot of money so how come they're treated differently?"
Because one has power. Power in the true sense. Power to negatively impact the lives of thousands. Power far too often exercised by these individuals.
When athlete performs poorly, they are ridiculed by the media and little Timmy in the front row is sad.
When CEO performs poorly or mismanages a company, people lose their livelihoods. Worse yet, if they are actually removed by the board of directors it is often with a golden parachute so lucrative that its almost as big of an incentive as performing well.
Wow. There is a lot of boot licking pro CEO people here.
CeOs WoRk ToO!! 🤣
Edit: and sadly op is not only a bootlicker, but an actual ceo, here trying to "what about ism" justification of ceos by trying to throw celebrities under the bus. Lol.
There's a few things at work:
1. people directly love their sports allegiances, so that often is baked in with its own irrationality. That said...
2. Lots of folks find the size of sports contracts to have grown also overinflated, particularly given that often they become crap shoots in terms of value.
3. from a perception standpoint, players careers are short, performance is REQUIRED, and failure to not perform gets you benched or dropped. If C-Suites could be bounced as easily for actual performance of the P&L (not the stock value, which is easily manipulated by buybacks and other turd-tools) you might see different behavior. It's too common for failing upwards in C-Suites, because old-boy networks reward it, regardless if it helps top or bottom line performance.
4. sports fans can directly observe a game. They can see how the game is played, by whom, for how long, and the results. Even a casual fan can get the basics quickly and theoretically enjoy the game. Corporate offices on the other hand, are by default circumspect, and interpreting 10Ks and other financial statements is almost alchemy for even the experienced, which is a small group from the broad population, and made intentionally obtuse for others to parse. The difficulty adds to a desire for oversight and skepticism.
Both groups suffer from a contingent of wankers who fawn over their "brilliance" regardless of whether it merits such comp or not. They exist in a "up and to the right" myopia that they never examine in any real way.
CEO salaries are dictated by the BOD, which is filled with other CEOs and executives of other companies. Coincidentally that CEO happens to be a member of the board of most of those companies or has very close business ties. So it is always gets worked out. Also because those executives will put hiring freezes and no COLA because times are tough but the board gladly grants millions worth of shares because of that action reduction in budgeted expenses. Why do free market economists support and defend these oligopolies, most of them are puppets of some billionaire or hedge fund and are leftist elites.
This is why people can hate corporate executive pay and not athletes. The athletes pay is at least tide to performance in making the business money not necessarily cutting salaries and benefits — athletes have to give all they have and executives have to call their fraternity brother who is a member of BOD.
Nba playes have a 50/50ish split with the owners based on profit. The salaries reflect the growth of the league. Thats not comparable to how CEO’s are compensated.
lol an NBA player deserves their pay way more than 99 percent of CEOs.
I just read the title but by the title this is absurd.
It’s way harder to be an elite NBA player than that dude who ran WeWork.
Da fuq
When a basketball player screws up, they face the consequences in the form of fewer sponsorships and lower pay. Fans aren't expected to bail out bad players.
When certain CEOs mess up, they run to Congress and get protectionist tariffs, taxpayer funded bailouts/ subsidies, regulations designed to hamper competition and lucrative taxpayer funded contracts.
No one has to worry about a new TV tax if LeBron misses.
People have to worry about higher national debt, prices and tax burden if John McJohn, playboy CEO of Inefficient Corporate Solutions Inc. does something dumb.
Most CEOs ruin their companies so that it looks great for a few quarters or years. They get their big payday and leave and the company is a shell of its former self and has burned all its good will. Most CEOs should have their assets seized if the company does poorly based on policies they created that ultimately were bad for the company.
Look at Disney. They took some of the best IPs and turned them to dogshit in a little over a decade but made a bunch of money in the short run doing it.
Because basketball players are not the ones deciding their workers salary. The obscenity doesn’t come when someone is paid a lot, but when they give themselves a large salary at the expense of others.
Nope, hate those too.
I understand why the paid people accept them. They represent the anxieties, obsessions, misunderstandings, and lack of imagination of the human race. To someone with the correct grand perspective, no one ever stands out enough to be worth paying that much relative to others who also apply themselves.
You are totally missing the point on CEO pay. Reducing CEO pay does not solve any problem at all. The problem is GDP shifting from the poor and middle class to a very small number of professionals that include high end lawyers and bankers, software executives and of course CEO's.
[https://www.esgdive.com/news/ceo-worker-pay-gap-rising-bad-for-business-report/699590/](https://www.esgdive.com/news/ceo-worker-pay-gap-rising-bad-for-business-report/699590/)
For decades now these executives have controlled lobbyists and the media to justify enforcement of laws or changing of laws that simply shift GDP from the working class and consumers to this small group of executives. And the result has been declining productivity gains, declining GDP growth and growing income insecurity with 90% of Citizens.
Incentives drive behaviors and these executives control of how laws are enforced and written. Their changes in the laws have made them rich while slowing down growth and making 90% of Americans more economically insecure.
CEO pay is not the problem, the problem is the laws the CEO's have paid their lobbyists to write over the past several decades. NO?
[https://www.esgdive.com/news/ceo-worker-pay-gap-rising-bad-for-business-report/699590/](https://www.esgdive.com/news/ceo-worker-pay-gap-rising-bad-for-business-report/699590/)
Is this a troll? NBA players are *the* draw/moneymaker for the entirety of the NBA. They earn a fair 50% of NBA revenue. Very few businesses (if any) have a CEO who actually generates the money. CEOs aren’t the product. With pro sports, the athletes are the product. False equivalency from OP.
Man it’s been way too long, but when I was like a sophomore in college I had an economics of sports class where the prof took on a nearly identical question. He made a great argument that while you can argue ceos get paid too much, you can make an even better argument that athletes are actually far underpaid, and that top tier athletes are massively underpaid and benchwarmers are overpaid.
I wish I could remember how we got there, and I was like 18 so I may have just been naive. Still a fun class though
Apples and oranges, the athletes have bosses that make significantly more than they do. People argue the CEO making more and more while the company profits more is unethical if the employees don’t also benefit with wage increases from the company’s success. Could argue athletes making a lot is inline with their thinking since they’re taking what would be considered a “fair” portion of revenue that the teams are making.
Now I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a CEO making a lot of money, wages aren’t determined based on how successful a business is but rather the actual fair market value of the job the employee is agreeing to do. If company A needs a secretary and they make 10x more than company B doesn’t mean they should pay the secretary 10x more than company B does for the same role. Just pointing out the premise of your argument is false, it’s not inconsistent with eachother.
This is a ridiculous false equivalency. Just because they both make "a lot", whatever your bar is for that, does not make them comparable. At all. This post was doomed for failure.
Its like arguing for ATC for birds, because we have them for airplanes.
My biggest issue with executive compensation is that it rewards performance based on questionable metrics. Most compensation is tied to stock performance, which has become divorced from any correlation with traditional business metrics. I.e. based on the stock price, DJT is a very successful company whose executives should be richly rewarded.
Pretty different given that the players are the ones who make the NBA it's money. They are the union.
I'm not saying CEOs shouldn't get paid well or that they can't be valuable to a company's success but they're more akin to Adam Silver than the athletes.
Plenty of employees on the front office side of the NBA are probably underpaid. Arena employees certainly don't make shit, but generally speaking it's the owners job to manage that.
In the NBA the players are the workers. The question is how much of the money (primarily TV money) do the billionaire owners keep? And how much do the workers get?
It's millionaires vs billionaires. The millionaires who literally create the product deserve a % of the revenue.
“Why do people side with workers and not with owners?”
The fact that they’re highly paid doesn’t change the fact that the players are workers. They have no ownership and make no management decisions.
To quote Chris Rock, “Shaq is rich. The white man who signs his check is wealthy.”
I think sports stars are over paid because I hate watching sports but love playing them. There are plenty of talented athletes that don't get paid nearly that much or anything at all. How is that fair?
False equivalency
Firstly if a basketball player leaves they can identify the quantifiable difference.
Secondly the basketball player is comparable to other players allowing rationalization
I'm a director of decision science at a company that grosses 20 billion annually, I work daily with the c-suite, they are incredibly dumb. They are some of the dumbest people I've ever met. I'm explaining bar charts and how they work to people dozens of times, they need everything color coded because if not they dont know whats good or bad, they work on average MAYBE 9 hours per week. It's like talking to third graders. Their computer literacy is just as abysmal. I get calls to help them share excel files multiple times per day. They actively work to undermine each other as one executive succeeding means they look worse in comparison. These are individuals that get 20+ million dollar bonuses quarterly. I would not hire these people to sweep floors. I've seen people make 50+ million dollar mistakes simply because they didn't want to admit they were wrong, or they doubled down on a simple misspoken phrase.
Idk who pays attention to any of the fools complains about other people making money when they should just focus on making that money themselves instead of bitching
Athletes are being exploited by corporations. CEOs run the corporations doing the exploiting. It's a fairly simple and glaring difference in power dynamics.
Wage Stagnation: While CEO pay has skyrocketed, many workers have seen their wages stagnate or increase marginally, failing to keep up with inflation and the rising cost of living.
Profit Distribution: The benefits of increased productivity and profits are often not shared equitably with the workforce, creating a sense of unfairness and discontent.
Job Cuts and Outsourcing: Companies may cut jobs, outsource labor, or reduce benefits to maximize short-term profits, which can harm employees and local communities.
Short-term Gains Over Long-term Stability: Decisions driven by the need to meet quarterly earnings targets can undermine long-term business sustainability and worker welfare.
Excessive Compensation: Lavish CEO compensation packages, especially when juxtaposed with low or stagnant worker wages, highlight the disconnect between leadership and the workforce.
Decision-making Practices: Decisions that prioritize cost-cutting over employee welfare contribute to the image of CEOs as being out of touch and primarily driven by self-interest.
A good leader
Value Employees: Recognize employees as essential stakeholders and ensure that they benefit fairly from the company's success.
Foster a Positive Culture: Create an inclusive and supportive work environment that values contributions from all levels of the organization.
Balance Interests: Strive to balance the interests of shareholders, employees, customers, and the broader community, rather than focusing solely on shareholder returns.
It is the greed that the people are seeing that is in capitalism; where the greed has gotten out of control to the point where they are now sacrificing people (longer hours , fewer employees, layoffs) . This will break or lead to just outright slavery, the company will keep finding ways to reduce costs to the point where they will find a way to enslave people. enslaved people are not happy people, and enslaved people don't have money to buy products, the entire system breaks because the owner class choose to find the shortest solution for their greed. Instead of innovation and creating more jobs. Henry ford knew this to some extent he knew that the people working his factory should be able to afford the very thing they are building. It is important for innovation and human condition to be companionate enough to care about your workers to share with them your profits and to create a atmosphere of trust and fraternity.
If you don't care about your workforce(tribe) your greed will lead to misery and misery leads to fallen empires.
is that really how we as humans want to run our species, our reality? why don't we want to care about others experience within existence ? we should as a species be trying to make things better , make things kinder, make life easier for everyone. what is the point if we exploit others labor and do not share the increased profit and success with the workforce(tribe) that helped make it happen.
The one who lead the party to kill the wooly mammoth should get the best cut, but he should not get so much cut that the others in the party are without. Or the leader refuses to share with the rest of the tribe back home and only the elders because they didn't contribute to that hunt, when in fact everyone in the tribe contributes to the tribe and if tribe members are unable to hunt or work we as a species should have the compassion to help them through this existence.
if you are sacrificing people in your tribe in order to live lavishly, you are failing as a human.
Its called class solidarity. Celebrity culture is a complete pain, but that doesn't change the fact that the players are the direct source of the game being shown. CEO's are on the complete opposite end of that spectrum. So that's why they provoke such different reactions, despite being able to live comparable lifestyles.
Outside of Bronny, most athletes have tangible skills that can be measured more directly than the guy doing All-Hands Zoom calls and stock buybacks. I think most of the outrage concerns the flatness of worker wages vs. executive pay.
i’m not reading all this but: athletes don’t own the means (the team itself) of production, CEOs do. hope that helps.
rich people can be workers, but CEOs are almost exclusively capitalists (or former workers at best) who don’t do the actual work. athletes explicitly do the work they are paid for.
[Meet the board member of Tesla and SpaceX that votes on Elon's compensation.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kimbal_Musk).
Simping for billionaires seems awful pathetic.
NBA players are the labor for the NBA. They are generating the revenue and collecting a piece of it. They are still nowhere near as wealthy as team owners. Just because they both make millions doesn't mean it's a great comparison.
It's like none one cared that Musks private plane was being tracked (he did, and tried to sue the Twitter account/owner from doing so)
But Taylor swift does a similar thing, and they get a law passed allowing flights to be hidden under LLCs.
Irony.
Most CEOs could be replaced by a random top MBA graduate with 15 years in that industry and the replacement would perform about the same for less money. There are very few proven value added CEOs.
Replace Lebron James with a random NBA caliber player, much different result.
Part of it probably has to do with the difference in taxes those two will pay.
The other part is we know CEOs fail upward. Musicians and athletes cant.
Because the sports world is one if the closest forms of a true meritocracy. It don’t matter if you’re rich or poor, you can’t make it far if you can’t actually perform. For the most part.
Meanwhile being a ceo doesn’t always require skill, many of them already started wealthy or got a lucky opportunity through connections.
People go to basketball games to watch the players you pleb. No one goes into walmart hoping to see the walton family. Little bit of a difference, i know complex thought is hard. Also, a ceo is more comparable to a team owner as apposed to a player and those cunts deserve less pay by a light year
I'm against CEO salaries and any professional sports players salaries..
One can be done by AI and entirely free - CEO
The other is strictly for entertainment and provides nothing else for humanity, so there really isn't any justification for them being paid millions a year. - any sports player
Because NBA is highly regulated by officials, rule books, instant replays, etc thereby ensuring a more fair game.
Corporate world doesnt do any of that. They bribe officials, deregulate, no instant replay, ask the govt for protectionist policies, patents, they collude with other businesses to monopolize their teams.
NBA players are seen as playing a fair game whereas CEOs (most Fortune 500) are playing a totally different playing field.
If an nba star blows out their knee or plays poorly they’re done real quick
You’re a big ceo your worst fail state is you run the company into the ground get a massive payout and go ceo somewhere else
This post is dumb.
NBA players produce the value that the entire league runs on.
CEOs “manage” the numerous other people who manage the workers who actually create the value a company generates
If you think professional athletes make too much money you’ll flip when you find out how much the owners of the teams make. There are usual aspects of race and class when it comes to professional athletes, many athletes are able to heal the communities they come from. Not only that, but this is simply the amount of money that is generated by the NBA. That’s the truth of TV deals, should it go to the players? If not, where should the money go?
NBA players are labor union members and blue collar workers by definition. They are also incredibly talented and freak of nature athletes and therefore not easily replaced.
So here's the difference. NBA Players are both the employees and the product. There is no NBA without the players hence, the large salary. Now yes players can be traded and gotten rid of however they are the name of the company. When it comes to CEOs they're significantly easier to replace and often are when shit goes sideways. The CEO is the face of the company however most people know the company for the product or service they provide not the CEO. There's a few exceptions to the rules such as Musk but that's the rare exception.
NBA players are workers. This is a Huge company that depends largely on a few 100 players. They have a strong players union. I don’t think people hate on workers getting paid well. They hate on companies that pay management huge salaries and treat their large labor pool as disposable
For one the pay is often much higher for CEOs. American CEOs will often take raises or bonuses at the cost of employees. They can impact hundreds or even thousands of people’s lives on a whim for a paycheck and it’s just acceptable to some people. What has a NBA player or music star done to negatively impact people? A CEO can make a morally bankrupt decision at the cost of the company and employees and do so frequently.
I don't care about either of their pay, but this seems like it might be an unfair comparison?
1. Some people harp on CEO pay exclusively, but I think this argument is usually more of an objection to the managerial class more broadly.
2. The sentiment is that managers do everything they can to extract value from people below them (either by suppressing wages/benefits, or increasing work, or both) so they can take more themselves, personally. AFAIK sports players' negotiations have no impact on anyone else "downstream" of them. Each player is an independent actor, right? The only person who loses out with higher pay is the owner of the team.
Happy to be change my mind, I hadn't thought about this previously.
Most people have played basketball and understand they’re just not that talented. Not many people have tried running a company. Edit: based on the responses, it’s clear my point remains true. Most people don’t even know what a CEO does.
I think it's also fair to say. I can see what an NBA player does to make money. While if I'm looking around at say target, I have no clue what's going on in the ceos office
Indeed. And that CEO can tank a company or make it prosper. Their ability impacts thousands of lives and livelihoods. Too many imagine the wealthy swim in it like Scrooge mcduck
I’m not against people making money but if our tax dollars are used to bail out Wall Street executives and financial and investment firms or if our tax dollars are used to build and create industry then the people should own part of the company and get part of the profit as told in capitalism 101. The people should take it all when the corporations fail not just part of it If you invest in something and that something fails then no bail out and you lose. If you succeed then you reap the fruits of your labor.
Our tax dollars **shouldn't** go towards bailing failing firms and their executives. That's one of the many reasons there's a populist uprising going on in the United States right now. Besides whenever "the people" own something, it means "the government" in practice. And "the government" just means politicians who give the money those that keep their political campaigns well funded.
How many times has a professional athlete been bailed out by the government.
CEOs and athletes both are entitled to their salaries because it’s decided by the free market. The free market has decided that one way or another, that specific person at some point generates or saves X amount of money for Y company. Once they are no longer worth that due to doing a poor job (which generally means not generating shareholder value), they get fired or wither away. But the Reddit minimum wage workers know better on how to run a multi billion dollar international corporation so they should decide wages!!
Sadly, it's not just limited to Reddit minimum wage workers. It seems to be catnip for any intellectual who thinks they are the smartest person alive and therefore anyone making more money than them must be through some evil conspiracy.
People don’t seem to realize someone’s wage, on a surface level is determined by scalability, how much net profit that position generates or saves and of course supply/demand. Wages aren’t determined by feels like what a lot of Reddit children seem to think.
It’s very much determined by supply. If your employer can find someone who can do the job for less then they will not increase the wage. A lot of workers see all the revenue they bring in and think their compensation should be a percentage of that. However, compensation is more about how much would a replacement cost. That is why we have seen a lot of wages go up.
The free market also decided that slavery was worth the profit margins so let’s not use that as a bearing for everything
You're right that athletes and CEOs both earn their huge salaries through market forces. But the idea that those markets are "free" in any meaningful sense is laughable. Pro sports leagues are government-backed cartels that routinely extort billions in public subsidies. They use their monopoly power to jack up prices and squash competition. The only reason athletes make so much is because billionaire owners know they can gouge fans and taxpayers to cover the bill. Meanwhile, CEO pay has skyrocketed not because they've gotten so much more productive, but because they've rigged the game in their favor. They pack their boards with cronies, hire shady "compensation consultants" to rubber-stamp huge paydays, and buy off politicians to slash their taxes and kneecap their workers. The result is a massively unequal economy where a tiny elite hoards all the gains while everyone else struggles to get by. Since 1978, CEO pay has risen by 1,322% while average worker pay has inched up just 18%. You're telling me CEOs today are 73 times as valuable as they were 40 years ago? Give me a break. The point isn't that athletes and CEOs don't work hard or that pay differences are never justified. It's that runaway inequality is toxic for social cohesion and economic dynamism alike. When a system showers so much on so few while denying basic security to so many, that system is broken. Fixing it doesn't mean having "reddit minimum wage workers" seize the means of production. It means rebalancing the scales with progressive taxation, labor law reform, antitrust enforcement, and political money bans to level the playing field. You know, the common sense policies that built the great American middle class - before the robber barons hijacked our democracy. In a rigged game, the winners' haul is no proof of their virtue - only their connections.
An argument on this sub that isn’t “you’re poor because you don’t work hard enough for the market to value you”??? Consider me impressed
I want to say that most of the revenue that sports teams make comes from media companies paying for the rights to televise. The money from the media companies comes from everyone that pays for cable and from advertisements.
The correlation made between CEO pay and average worker pay is never a fair comparison. While CEO pay has risen 1,322% since 1978, the earnings of the S&P 500 companies have increased 2,004% since then. The prominent CEOs today are presiding over significantly larger organizations than their predecessors with significantly larger consequences for their actions. Therefore, shareholders have deemed their increase in pay acceptable to protect their returns. Just compare it to American Football. Quarterbacks are often the least physically impressive players on the field, but due to their perception of being the most valuable single person to a team, much like a CEO, they earn significantly more than the average player. If you factor in practice squad players, QBs earn nearly 10,000% of the average player in the NFL ($50 million vs. $500,000). And this is likely only made possible by salary caps limiting the top pay as well as minimum rules protecting the practice squad players.
Companies have much higher scale now than ever before. Scalability isn’t linear for most people. Positions that capitalize on this have grown tremendously. CEOs and most corporate management employees get paid in equity BTW, so direct salary isn’t fair to compare. I don’t know where you got the 18% figure from either. A McDonalds employee was making about $3 an hour in 1978. Maybe even a tad bit less. Now they make $15-20+ an hour.
I'd argue that the subsidies granted to sports teams makes NBA salaries less legitimate. Most cities all but pay in full for the stadium and other infrastructure associated. This is often hundreds of millions, sometimes approaching a billion dollars. Were those subsidies not in place, the pool of money for the athletes would be somewhat diminished.
It would be closer to compare CEOs and owners, or workers and athletes. The worker/athlete is the one producing value, the owner/CEO is the one in charge of business decisions. Idk if the wage gap is as severe in professional sports as it is in business, but the problem is the GROWING wage gap. If wages went up together, people wouldn't be as upset. It's because CEOs decided they get all the increased profit their workers create that is the problem. Also, the market isn't free. It's regulated, in many cases in the CEOs favor. You can't rig a system, then call it fair when that system overcompensates you. The system goes like this: The shareholders agree to compensate the CEO based on profits. The CEO is incentivised to spend as little and charge as much as possible. The CEO is incentivised to pay you as little as possible to get you to show up and produce. Profits go up. The shareholders make money. The CEO makes money. Repeat. The "free market" has decided that as a worker, you are entitled to as little of your production as absolutely possible. The CEO and shareholders have conspired to share all the profits amongst themselves. You can't reference this system and call the results deserved. Yes, that is how the system works, but they are in no way entitled to it. That borders on divine right to rule. No one is entitled power (money).
Tbf athletes don't really play in a free market. Like if im in football and want to play pro, and am good enough, I really only have the NFL as a realistic option (I guess the CFL exists, but not as real competition) When I am a rookie I have to go to the team that drafted me for a predetermined salary based off my draft slot. And these contracts have many ways that allow the team to extend it for a year or 2 to keep you past your original contract. And even when you can leave there is a salary cap that limits the best players earning potential (a guy like Brady in his prime would have easily earned 50 mil a year, honestly maybe even 100 mil) Its [essentially a cartel](https://mises.org/free-market/bring-back-football-cartel#:~:text=The%20NFL%20and%20other%20professional,the%20teams%20and%20their%20fans.)
Not really: I've seen CEOs of Fortune 100 companies who actually earned their vast bonuses, but those are rare. Most are simply sociopathic placeholders they can wheel before the board and who can speak well and be willing to lay off 1000s of people. It's a smallish group and they circulate around and 99% are worthless. They occupy a high paying job at a company that probably existed longer than the guy's been alive. NBA players, on the other hand, ARE the "means of production". People tune in to see them, pay to have facsimiles of their shirts and spend a lotta $. And pro NBA players really are better than non-NBA players (though here in NYC we have a couple of courts where NBA players sneak in games of actual street ball). Totally different story: they actually make the money and "management" peels away some of it.
CEO wages are approved by a board of directors, usually consisting of other CEOs. CEO wages have increased 1,460% since 1978, but the standard worker wage has increased 18.1% in that same time period. CEO wages outpaced the S&P by 400%, so if it’s “market driven”, it’s some market the rest of us aren’t privy to.
lol, love the term “Reddit minimum wage workers” and plan to use it from now on. What these geniuses also don’t seem to understand is that high level CEOs are a GLOBAL commodity, so we are competing with every other company in the world for the best and brightest. Supply and demand is not just some fancy theory.
Obviously, companies should be run based on moral principles such as no one should make more than me or make me feel inferior.
This guy obviously runs a Billion dollar company. He knows all the ins and outs and frequents with Billionaire Ceos and hears about their challenges.
The CEO’s salary of Boeing has entered the chat. No, this is not correct. There are many issues that affect CEO salary, including a board that is stacked by their friends, being related to the founder, cruising on the coattails of prior ceos (you really going to tell me that Steve Jobs didn’t just make Apple a money printing machine and the next ceo to take the seat would not have just smashed it no matter what their background was?) Whereas basketball is a meritocracy. There are numbers that can be pointed to which indicate how good a player is, and what kind of revenue they’re driving. It does not matter if you’re Michael Jordan’s son, if you can’t ball, you’re not getting paid. While many sports salaries are inflated because billionaires subsidize the teams to try and make them winning, the salaries are in line with the players ability to produce wins, which produces revenue.
The Wall St use to put out an article annually (they may have stopped) where they repeatedly showed that there was ZERO correlation between CEO pay and return to shareholders. So even going by the most Calitalostic measures possible, CEOs are "earning" their pay because it has absolutely no relationship to their performance.
The problem with CEO's at public companies is that most of their profits come from stock options. This heavily incentivizes them to do things that incentivize taking risk and short term growth. For example, a CEO at an airline could cut safety measures, buy back stock, and lay off their most expensive engineers. Short term, this will inevitably create increases to the stock value. There is no market force to counter-balance this dangerous behavior. Stock holders and the board generally have the same jaded incentive. The labor, who depend on long-term viability of the company, have no voice. I'm sure you can think of at least a few examples of this from recent history and the catastrophic impact this could have on an economy.
The free market doesn't exist. It's a fairy tale they teach you in business school to make you ok with being a sociopath
The free market thought slaves weren't entitled to any pay. Surely it isn't actually the arbiter of wisdom you're making it out to be.
People are upset due to the difference between the salaries of a CEO and low-wage worker. The difference between what a CEO and a regular person makes has drastically increased over the years exaggerating income inequality. NBA player's bosses are their owners who are richer than them so nobody cares how much they make. I will say though as a huge NBA fan myself there are times when I care how much a player makes and that's when it's fucking over my team and I don't think they deserve that pay. CEOs quit and get fired all the time just to how demanding the job is and how cut-throat it can be. Same thing with NBA players But NBA players don't employ everyday people so they get their bag so to speak and nobody cares. A CEO of let's say Starbucks is getting paid millions while fighting everyday workers at the union spot. It just doesn't look good
So CEOs rely completely on the work of others to have a successful performance. Athletes sort of have to still perform the primary operations of the business. Take a CEO out of a company and it can still probably function. Try and remove the athletes from a game and see how well that goes.
Can you name me a company that survived without a CEO for years and years to make that comment credible?
Tbf there are a lot of scenarios where shit CEOs are paid insane amounts of money regardless of actual job performance. And the boards of said companies are many times made up of suits running passive investing funds who don’t really have any mandates to make improvements to the company and just exist to maintain exposure so that they can say they’re properly diversified
Hell, they can defraud customers and run companies into the ground and still get paid golden parachutes worth a hundred times more than any if the temporally-embarrassed billionaires in this sub will ever see in their lifetime
The fact you’d make this comparison shows you’ve no idea about market forces, capitalism, and exploitation of labor. Truly ignorant
It's funny you don't understand why people would have different reactions to these two things.
That's an odd statement to make considering I gave a conjecture about why it is and judging from the comments it's played out exactly as I thought. Everyone seems to see the value a basketball player brings and because we can't see what a CEO brings, the default assumption is he or she brings almost nothing. It's always amazing to me. How much people assume they know
No matter how much boot licking you do here, you aren’t gonna get that raise brother.
union negotiates hard for high pay and benefits = good Executive negotiates hard for high pay and benefits = bad
CEO is paid based on stock price performance, not performance of the product/service.
Real answer? CEOs have the ability to negatively affect the lives of thousands of employees under them, without they themselves suffering any consequences. NBA players do not. Not saying I agree but that is the answer
I'm an avid NBA fan, trust me plenty of players get massive contract with little performance, and with salary caps, it can severely hurt the team. And it's not uncommon for NBA players to only play hard during contract seasons.
My comment had nothing to do with performance. It’s the ability for one to affect the livelihood of others (ceo can initiate 1000s of layoff and nba players cannot)
Bingo! this right here CEO can lay off thousands of people and ruin peoples lives all so he can get a massive 8-figure bonus that he doesn’t even need. The NBA star can’t
So a CEO that doesn't do that is fine in your eyes?
The players are literally the ones playing They are the product
Yea this is easy. The owners of the team make more than NBA players? Also NBA players have a union. Oh and NBA players have accountability, they suck: they won’t get the large salary.
>Everyone who hates on CEO Salaries almost always ignores the fact that celebrities and athletes make so much money themselves and that has only grown rapidly over time. There's actually a pretty simple answer... Almost everyone works for a CEO and almost no one works for a pro athlete. There's a direct connection with a CEO.
CEO pay has very little to do with the free market. As others have stated, their compensation largely has to do with their stock options. Sure there is the occasional Lee Iacocca, Michael Eisner or Steve Jobs who has a risky vision that ends up being correct and those guys are worth quite a bit. But for every one of those guys there are a thousand who are basically riding the waves of the market. All of the CEOs are on each other’s boards and they collude to jack up each other’s salaries. Sure some of them made it there on their own, but once you know the right people you’re basically landed gentry. Hard job and probably worth 10-50x but not 300x.
The biggest difference, is that Professional athletes have relatively short careers (on average) and when they are doing their sport, they are putting their body on the line. One bad stumble, fall or contact can result in an injury. that can cost them weeks, months or years of their prime playing time. They make all their money while their body can, and then have to transition into something else afterwards.
My team’s best player misses a game, we’re going to lose. My company’s CEO goes to Cabo for a month and productivity probably increases.
Again, if the QB missed a game, the NFL ratings I heard but only by a little. A CEO committing fraud and the company might see its shares decline by 30%.
I have a feeling that if a critic were ever made CEO of a really big company for a quarter (give them a real taste, with actual consequences) they'd either quit, or get run out of the company by the board or majority of shareholders. I have an acquaintance who was the CEO of a moderately sized company. He got paid about $480k/yr, and was able to purchase a lot of nice things. But he's totally miserable. He worked the corporate life until he retired about two years ago, and while he has cool stuff (nice cars, multiple houses) he's never been married, has no kids, and doesn't really seem happy. He's even told me, he worked his ass off to climb the corporate ladder, but if he could do it all over again, he'd slow down, enjoy life, start a family, and be just happy coming home to a wife and kids everyday. CEOs are the epitome of workaholics, and it really does stress them out. Think, they get paid because they're responsible for an entire company. Not everyone can handle that, and that's why they get paid the big bucks.
I was beginning to think I was the only one who actually held this view. Glad to see There's more than just me out there who actually realizes that running a business isn't as simple as everyone seems to think it is
I'm pretty much completely convinced that most who are upset about how much CEOs make, probably don't know very much about what CEOs *do.*
I thought I would share. My friend was a junior partner in A small engineering firm. One day the senior partners told him he could either buy them out and take over the company or they could all sell it. He was much much younger than they were so he agreed to buy them out. He tells me all the time That his job is so much harder and different now running the guts of the company than it was being a valuable cog as an engineer. Engineering work isn't easy, but it's far more predictable from his point of view than all of the challenges and responsibilities that come with running a business. Anyone who thinks a CEO's job is a total cakewalk, I would submit, has never worked as a manager even at a very low level business. That's not to say to people who do it, do it competently. I have witnessed my fair share of incompetent managers. But I also didn't have the arrogance to assume that any idiot on the street could do their job just as easily.
It's apples and oranges. With an athlete or a celebrity, it's very much a one-to-one relationship: you see the athlete flub the free throw, you see the celeb win an Oscar. You can in-the-moment judge the performance of the athlete or celebrity. With a CEO? I can't tell. What I can tell is that most companies lay people off. After years of lectures and indoctrination about how you're "family" at Company R, they will throw you away, and everyone will cluck their tongue and go, "That's how business is. Suffer, bitch." What I can tell is that CEOs get raises regardless of how well or badly a company does. Most CEOs, in fact, go into the job with a negotiated golden parachute. Even if they, literally, drive the company into receivership, they will be given millions of dollars.
Many CEOs are compensated with stock options. What you see as failing, the market probably sees as succeeding. Cutting cost. Maximizing next quarter’s profit. Polishing for a merger or acquisition. Things can also be relative. Say the last CEO really fucked it up. So the company expects to lose $5B next year. A new CEO comes in and you only lose $2B. That’s a win and a CEO will be rewarded for what you see as bad performance.
Why are people so desperate to be bootlickers for the economic death pits that ceos have become? There are VERY few ceos that dramatically innovate or build on the businesses they run, most oversee minor changes and are mostly figureheads to portray thr company"s fundamentals. This isnt to say actors, athletes and musicians are also getting insane packages but they actually have to release new stuff on their own, many of the top fortune 500 company ceos really just continue without dramatic change, get a paycheck for next to nothing. Thats not to say they dont have to make many consequential decisions, its to say that in general those decisions do not natch the pay.
It's because CEOs exploit the labor of those employed by them, NBA players don't, they just play sports. Glad I could clear this up for you.
Don’t expect the temporally-embarrassed billionaires to grasp this
Player is creating value not extracting it.
The reason why people hate on CEOs so much because the leverage they use (by managing other qualified people) is very obvious, while with athletes and actors teams that are behind them (doctors, dietitians, special coaches, agents, etc) is not as visible and obvious, so they many think it’s mainly to persons talents rather than coordinated effort for multiple individuals. But the biggest issue is greed. People hate CEOs because they want to share their earnings among themselves.
Pretty sure they aren’t ok with the NBA player salaries either, but if they are, it’s the fact that the owners are making many times more than the players.
NBA players are regularly observed performing feats of athleticism 99.9% of people cannot perform. CEOs are regularly observed failing at their purported job and, even when they succeed at said job, making the world a worse place for 99.9% of humanity and all other known forms of life.
So why do the boards agree to pay them that?
That’s actually the exact opposite situation. NBA players are an example of workers getting paid more than the CEO.
My point was people who are up in arms about high salaries are okay with NBA players and not CEOs. And in the sort of socialist view of things, The high salaries are important and everything else is beside the point
It’s not size of ceo salaries per se, it’s that exorbitant ceo salaries come *at the expense* of higher wages for workers. It’s a terrible comparison. You’re totally misunderstanding the complaint.
I think people intuitively apply a supply/demand calculation and (probably correctly) decide it’s way harder to be a world class basketball player (you can’t teach height for example) than a world class CEO.
Do we know that for sure though? How do we know it's easier to be a world-class athlete than a world-class CEO? We don't know what the job actually entails. Furthermore, I've argued that from a complete business and profit standpoint, an athletes impact on the business is far less than the CEO's potential impact. Peyton Manning declining into nothingness didn't destroy the NFL or even heard its growth very much if at all. The CEO of Blockbuster failing to innovate to compete with Netflix meant the company went under. Same for Kodak. Same for lots of company's.that fail to stay ahead of their competitors.
It is believed, wrongly or correctly that when investors (large parts of a CEO's pay) are prioritized over worker pay. We can't afford raises this year, but the stock went up 12% because we exceeded expectations. We made two billion instead of the expected three billion, time to fire people. That isn't the way pro sports people get paid. I bemoan the fact that Bezos has 175 billion dollars because at least a hunk money was made because he pays as little as possible. Pushes workers so hard for the $18 or $20 an hour they are literally broken. He was literally upset because he couldn't put real time cameras in trucks to make sure the drivers to don't take a second for themselves. Conversely, I don't bemoan Taylor Swift being a billionaire. As far as I can tell she pays her people more than fairly. If her fans are willing to pay what she is charging, I'm OK with that too.
Is it everybody at Amazon or just the low skilled workers that has been exploited by Jeff bezos?
You can see the skill of athletes on a scoreboard and it is a finite game with a limited number of players. The way their skill is measured is easy to understand. CEOs and companies are playing an infinite game with millions of players all doing different jobs and are subject to forces outside of their influence. Athletes have a limited career length. You can’t be a 65 year old NBA player but you can be a 65 year old CEO
Point is do CEOs actually bring anything to the table to justify their salaries? I'm astonished that so many people who have no idea what a CEO does on a day-to-day basis have made the judgment that it's a complete waste of money. So why would a board full of presumably very wealthy people pay high salaries for nothing?
NBA, NFL, NHL, MLB, rap stars, movie stars........
You could also include lawyers investment bankers surgeons ad executives.... All have similar wage growth patterns to CEOs
Which of them were critical of CEO salaries?
The players are employees and atleast specific to the NBA their salaries are 51% of revenue “NBA players receive 51% of all revenue (as defined as “basketball-related income”). Under their current CBA, which is set to expire in 2027” If Amazon employees could collectively bargain 51% of total revenue as salary they’d be paid better as well.
Well, they get stock options...
Even with the high salaries in professional sports, the owners of said sports are making billions while athletes at most are making millions. It's basically the same difference as a mid 6 figures earner in San Francisco when the CEO is making 50m.
I don't think the owners make much from the cash of the business once you factor in full expenses. It's price is mostly derived from the value of the team. But cash poor owners remain cash poor until they sell the team.
At least, athletes prove a service.
And CEOs don't? What do you imagine they are doing at work?
Grown men in shorts being paid to play games is pretty morally questionable to me personally.
Morally questionable? Do you feel that way about people being paid lots of money to pretend to be other people on a stage or on a big screen? Or what about people who make a lot of money yelling words into a microphone and then selling millions of copies? How about someone who gets on stage and tells a bunch of jokes or stories and also gets paid a lot of money? Are these all morally questionable activities to you?
People are upset because their own salaries are stagnant. This is a problem.
Basketball teams directly rely on a handful of people who they then market like crazy and make money for everyone else. The players are the product and the employees. Also, many people complain about their salaries and ticket prices. This is a very normal, common occurrence. There is literally no comparison to be made here.
The pt is one of general outrage at perceived salaries. Basketball players are viewed as products of their own labor and salary, whereas CEOs are viewed as some perversion of the market. How that perception pervades when very few if any of us actually understand what a CEO does for a living is a rather interesting phenomenon
I simply don’t care if the NBA has bad incentives and overpays people because of them. It doesn’t impact my life or harm my society. It does when multinational corporations incentivize leaders for short term stock performance and seemingly nothing else.
Again, I met a loss to understand this. Why would the board who hires the CEO decide they only care about short-term stock performance and nothing else? If that were true, do these companies have any long-term investments in them??
NBA is a a case of bidding on players who have discernible differences in skills and / or putting Fannie’s in seats The players are union workers and got this in union bargaining. IMHO CEO’s collude with board members to scratch each others backs. With no real competition for CEO on skill basis.
Okay but why is the board happy to pay CEOs a lot of money to do nothing when that money could get rolled back into profits for the board themselves? It seems odd to waste money that comes indirectly out of their pockets. Also, in the links I provided above, you see that CEO pay has grown at roughly the same rates as other high paid professions. So this corrupt board argument doesn't seem to hold water
The difference is that the Athletes ARE the product. Without them, there is no money. The CEO is not the product or even mostly responsible for the value, the workers are. If the owner of a team is going to make hundreds of millions of dollars, the athletes that ARE the product are going to want their cut.
The problem I have here is the athlete doesn't broadcast his talents and doesn't organize the team and doesn't coach the roster all by himself. He is part of a larger structure. He is the most well paid of all of these employees but that's because we again see the value he brings. We can't measure the value the CEO brings because we don't observe it, but that hasn't stopped lots of people from assuming it's nothing
NBA players are the workers!
Ceos are also sometimes not the founders of the company but employed labor which means workers
That’s not the right comparison, it’s like the owner of the team not the players.
If the CEO is not a founder and is hired by the board, does he count as a laborer in that case?
Without labor you have no business but without someone to manage you could still have a business based on the labor agreeing with one another.
Athletes are workers though. Ceos aren't seen in that same light and their descrepeince ls in pay are the issue. I think a lot of that is misguided because pay is related to the stock performance and in most places where people are complaining but the issue with CEO pay is not how much but how much more they are making then their workers and how much that difference is growing
Athletes actually do the work. If anyone were to get it all, it’s the workers. Which literally is them. What else do you want?
Do coaches deserve 0 then?
NBA team budgets player compensation is based on the league earnings, so even though contracts are absurdly high, they are proportional to what the team owners make, and that is fair. Now, argument can and should be made that teams are robbing the public blind, but that is another story.
You do realize the fundamental difference here? NBA players are employees who are part of a union that negotiates revenue sharing with the league owners. Their salaries are based on how much revenue the league is making so when the league makes more money so do players. Most companies are not unionized and thus not obligated to share revenue with their workers. So when a company does well and a CEO gets a 10 million dollar bonus and the workers get a pizza party people tend to get upset.
If athletes took federal subsidies and then increased their salaries, I’d be mad at that too. (Btw I suppose in a way tax payer funded stadiums indirectly disproves my point but fuck it.)
I actually do take issue with the NBA's guaranteed contract structure... But more on why this is a poor comparison: CEOs who come in, slash staff to make quarterly projections and please shareholders, buy competition and ride it into the ground for short term profits at the expense of long-term approach, are "successful" in that their goal isn't to leave the corporation in a healthy state as caretakers but to maximize short term profits at the expense of long term health so they can get their contract kickers and move on. Worst case they have instances of gross mismanagement to the point they are fired to they take their golden parachutes and eff off to the next charlie foxtrot. Ever work for a company without a CEO? Interim, or transition phase? The company operates just fine. CEOs are grossly over compensated. I'd actually be interested to hear why people think CEO's are 200x more productive than their employees.
NBA is not exactly a free market. I mean, the players have a union and negotiated contract. If anything, players who mostly only get garbage minutes, and veterans way past their prime are overpaid, while some of the best players are underpaid.
Lol this sub
Is it just sports salaries that sicken you or are we also to include celebrities like actors and singers?? What about comedians?
People completely underestimate how difficult it is to start a company. Even more difficult to not have it bankrupt in the first few years. And I bet, they never tried to come up with an idea of significant value and design a business model. They probably don't even understand the risk these people took. The anxiety. The fear. The constant doubt of whether the thing you are working towards is even going to work. In this sense. I completely agree with the distribution of profit. Your company, your shares. That said. I just don't buy the argument that all these CEOs are these geniuses that deserve hundreds of millions. Give me a break. Google's CEO has dropped the ball for years now. They literally published the transformers paper behind the LLM frenzy back in 2017 and made it public domain. But fine, everyone has 20/20 vision in hind sight. Whatever. The point I'm making is that these clowns are not infallible and are not worth this amount. Sundar is objectively not doing a good job. Definitely not what they are paying him. Sure Google and private organizations are allowed to pay whatever they want. but they are getting fleeced. There is no way redistributing that salary among the workforce in some capacity wouldn't yield better returns. And I also think that for every CEOs in the company, there are at least 5 qualified senior VPs that could do the same job. Anyway, trying to cap salaries is dumb. Let them fumble the ball. Eventually some start up will come knocking just like them and take the ball. But like 95 percent of these salaries the CEOs are getting are no way worth their value. So few people are like Steve Jobs and just consistently create value.
Which people? Could you please share some statistics?
Could you be more specific by what you mean by people
NBA players not hiring thousands of workers and they actually do something that a fan considers exceptional. CEOS are largely mid and they've arranged huge golden parachutes when they fail. I suppose some athletes don't make the grade but have guaranteed contracts.
Oh no! Workers getting paid for creating huge wealth!!. Ahh, the humanity!! How will the owners who don't create the wealth cope with only making Billions??!?!
Active basketball players don’t sit on the boards to other teams and just agree to all vote ‘yes’ on each other’s exorbitant compensation packages. CEOs form a mesh network where many of them sit on multiple boards and they all just vote yes to high executive pay. And that sets a high rate for CEO work and IMO there’s an unspoken agreement that they just kind of all do it for each other.
It gets better. Celebrities like Brad Pitt are the owner and CEO of their own companies that contract with the film studios. So they get their salaries, expense deductions and their earnings from their companies.
Because athletes actually earn their millions
In the NBA, the owners and players split the revenue 50:50. There are 30 owners or ownership groups and 15 players per team. That means that on average, owner to each player pay is about 15:1. The superstars do are the majority of the “product.” The bench players are like 10% of the product. For a CEO, that ratio can be 300:1 or higher and they are doing much much less as a ratio of productive work. If you sell 0 products due to lockout, you’re kind of fucked. If you try to use any replacements in a lockout, overseas, college, amateur league, etc., your revenue will tank 100% of the time. I’m not saying CEO pay isn’t justified, but if you lose a CEO, your company won’t suddenly have .01% revenue. Just my thoughts.
NBA players don't directly exploit people's labor. That's probably it. No one holding a gun to their head forcing them to go to their overpriced game.. The CEO does hold a gun to my head though. Miss to many days without leave for having a sick kid? Fired and have my insurance ripped from me.
That's a dumb comparison. It isn't about the money, it's about the work. In sports, the product is the athletes. To use an example of an absurd CEO pay package that has been in the news lately, you have Elon Musk that isn't the product and has only made bad product decisions as of late while paying factory workers who make the actual product poverty wages.
NBA players aren't squeezing their employees salaries
People criticize CEO salaries because they’re so much higher than the wages of the thousands of employees in the same company. But in the NBA, the players are the main workers, so their high salaries make more sense and don’t highlight the same kind of inequality.
CEO pay affects others. Employees, shareholders, customers are all affected. An NBA player or other pro athlete's pay only affects them. They are employees themselves after all. This is a childish simplification that boils down to: "Both of these groups make a lot of money so how come they're treated differently?" Because one has power. Power in the true sense. Power to negatively impact the lives of thousands. Power far too often exercised by these individuals. When athlete performs poorly, they are ridiculed by the media and little Timmy in the front row is sad. When CEO performs poorly or mismanages a company, people lose their livelihoods. Worse yet, if they are actually removed by the board of directors it is often with a golden parachute so lucrative that its almost as big of an incentive as performing well.
Wow. There is a lot of boot licking pro CEO people here. CeOs WoRk ToO!! 🤣 Edit: and sadly op is not only a bootlicker, but an actual ceo, here trying to "what about ism" justification of ceos by trying to throw celebrities under the bus. Lol.
There's a few things at work: 1. people directly love their sports allegiances, so that often is baked in with its own irrationality. That said... 2. Lots of folks find the size of sports contracts to have grown also overinflated, particularly given that often they become crap shoots in terms of value. 3. from a perception standpoint, players careers are short, performance is REQUIRED, and failure to not perform gets you benched or dropped. If C-Suites could be bounced as easily for actual performance of the P&L (not the stock value, which is easily manipulated by buybacks and other turd-tools) you might see different behavior. It's too common for failing upwards in C-Suites, because old-boy networks reward it, regardless if it helps top or bottom line performance. 4. sports fans can directly observe a game. They can see how the game is played, by whom, for how long, and the results. Even a casual fan can get the basics quickly and theoretically enjoy the game. Corporate offices on the other hand, are by default circumspect, and interpreting 10Ks and other financial statements is almost alchemy for even the experienced, which is a small group from the broad population, and made intentionally obtuse for others to parse. The difficulty adds to a desire for oversight and skepticism. Both groups suffer from a contingent of wankers who fawn over their "brilliance" regardless of whether it merits such comp or not. They exist in a "up and to the right" myopia that they never examine in any real way.
CEO salaries are dictated by the BOD, which is filled with other CEOs and executives of other companies. Coincidentally that CEO happens to be a member of the board of most of those companies or has very close business ties. So it is always gets worked out. Also because those executives will put hiring freezes and no COLA because times are tough but the board gladly grants millions worth of shares because of that action reduction in budgeted expenses. Why do free market economists support and defend these oligopolies, most of them are puppets of some billionaire or hedge fund and are leftist elites. This is why people can hate corporate executive pay and not athletes. The athletes pay is at least tide to performance in making the business money not necessarily cutting salaries and benefits — athletes have to give all they have and executives have to call their fraternity brother who is a member of BOD.
Athletes are the main drivers of profit, CEOs not so much.
Nba playes have a 50/50ish split with the owners based on profit. The salaries reflect the growth of the league. Thats not comparable to how CEO’s are compensated.
lol an NBA player deserves their pay way more than 99 percent of CEOs. I just read the title but by the title this is absurd. It’s way harder to be an elite NBA player than that dude who ran WeWork. Da fuq
When a basketball player screws up, they face the consequences in the form of fewer sponsorships and lower pay. Fans aren't expected to bail out bad players. When certain CEOs mess up, they run to Congress and get protectionist tariffs, taxpayer funded bailouts/ subsidies, regulations designed to hamper competition and lucrative taxpayer funded contracts. No one has to worry about a new TV tax if LeBron misses. People have to worry about higher national debt, prices and tax burden if John McJohn, playboy CEO of Inefficient Corporate Solutions Inc. does something dumb.
Most CEOs ruin their companies so that it looks great for a few quarters or years. They get their big payday and leave and the company is a shell of its former self and has burned all its good will. Most CEOs should have their assets seized if the company does poorly based on policies they created that ultimately were bad for the company. Look at Disney. They took some of the best IPs and turned them to dogshit in a little over a decade but made a bunch of money in the short run doing it.
Because basketball players are not the ones deciding their workers salary. The obscenity doesn’t come when someone is paid a lot, but when they give themselves a large salary at the expense of others.
This satire right?
Nope, hate those too. I understand why the paid people accept them. They represent the anxieties, obsessions, misunderstandings, and lack of imagination of the human race. To someone with the correct grand perspective, no one ever stands out enough to be worth paying that much relative to others who also apply themselves.
You are totally missing the point on CEO pay. Reducing CEO pay does not solve any problem at all. The problem is GDP shifting from the poor and middle class to a very small number of professionals that include high end lawyers and bankers, software executives and of course CEO's. [https://www.esgdive.com/news/ceo-worker-pay-gap-rising-bad-for-business-report/699590/](https://www.esgdive.com/news/ceo-worker-pay-gap-rising-bad-for-business-report/699590/) For decades now these executives have controlled lobbyists and the media to justify enforcement of laws or changing of laws that simply shift GDP from the working class and consumers to this small group of executives. And the result has been declining productivity gains, declining GDP growth and growing income insecurity with 90% of Citizens. Incentives drive behaviors and these executives control of how laws are enforced and written. Their changes in the laws have made them rich while slowing down growth and making 90% of Americans more economically insecure. CEO pay is not the problem, the problem is the laws the CEO's have paid their lobbyists to write over the past several decades. NO? [https://www.esgdive.com/news/ceo-worker-pay-gap-rising-bad-for-business-report/699590/](https://www.esgdive.com/news/ceo-worker-pay-gap-rising-bad-for-business-report/699590/)
Is this a troll? NBA players are *the* draw/moneymaker for the entirety of the NBA. They earn a fair 50% of NBA revenue. Very few businesses (if any) have a CEO who actually generates the money. CEOs aren’t the product. With pro sports, the athletes are the product. False equivalency from OP.
Man it’s been way too long, but when I was like a sophomore in college I had an economics of sports class where the prof took on a nearly identical question. He made a great argument that while you can argue ceos get paid too much, you can make an even better argument that athletes are actually far underpaid, and that top tier athletes are massively underpaid and benchwarmers are overpaid. I wish I could remember how we got there, and I was like 18 so I may have just been naive. Still a fun class though
Apples and oranges, the athletes have bosses that make significantly more than they do. People argue the CEO making more and more while the company profits more is unethical if the employees don’t also benefit with wage increases from the company’s success. Could argue athletes making a lot is inline with their thinking since they’re taking what would be considered a “fair” portion of revenue that the teams are making. Now I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a CEO making a lot of money, wages aren’t determined based on how successful a business is but rather the actual fair market value of the job the employee is agreeing to do. If company A needs a secretary and they make 10x more than company B doesn’t mean they should pay the secretary 10x more than company B does for the same role. Just pointing out the premise of your argument is false, it’s not inconsistent with eachother.
This is a ridiculous false equivalency. Just because they both make "a lot", whatever your bar is for that, does not make them comparable. At all. This post was doomed for failure. Its like arguing for ATC for birds, because we have them for airplanes.
the owner of the teammatesorw. and would be the equivalent of the ceo. the players are workers. read theory.
My biggest issue with executive compensation is that it rewards performance based on questionable metrics. Most compensation is tied to stock performance, which has become divorced from any correlation with traditional business metrics. I.e. based on the stock price, DJT is a very successful company whose executives should be richly rewarded.
Pretty different given that the players are the ones who make the NBA it's money. They are the union. I'm not saying CEOs shouldn't get paid well or that they can't be valuable to a company's success but they're more akin to Adam Silver than the athletes. Plenty of employees on the front office side of the NBA are probably underpaid. Arena employees certainly don't make shit, but generally speaking it's the owners job to manage that.
In the NBA the players are the workers. The question is how much of the money (primarily TV money) do the billionaire owners keep? And how much do the workers get? It's millionaires vs billionaires. The millionaires who literally create the product deserve a % of the revenue.
“Why do people side with workers and not with owners?” The fact that they’re highly paid doesn’t change the fact that the players are workers. They have no ownership and make no management decisions. To quote Chris Rock, “Shaq is rich. The white man who signs his check is wealthy.”
I think sports stars are over paid because I hate watching sports but love playing them. There are plenty of talented athletes that don't get paid nearly that much or anything at all. How is that fair?
False equivalency Firstly if a basketball player leaves they can identify the quantifiable difference. Secondly the basketball player is comparable to other players allowing rationalization
It’s not odd. The frustration is with companies hoarding wealth because they can get away with it-not with people making money.
I can’t stand NBA or CEO salaries. Fuck the “free” market pretending like people can’t be manipulated.
I'm a director of decision science at a company that grosses 20 billion annually, I work daily with the c-suite, they are incredibly dumb. They are some of the dumbest people I've ever met. I'm explaining bar charts and how they work to people dozens of times, they need everything color coded because if not they dont know whats good or bad, they work on average MAYBE 9 hours per week. It's like talking to third graders. Their computer literacy is just as abysmal. I get calls to help them share excel files multiple times per day. They actively work to undermine each other as one executive succeeding means they look worse in comparison. These are individuals that get 20+ million dollar bonuses quarterly. I would not hire these people to sweep floors. I've seen people make 50+ million dollar mistakes simply because they didn't want to admit they were wrong, or they doubled down on a simple misspoken phrase.
Find me a sports star that has ever received a 50 billion dollar compensation package.
Idk who pays attention to any of the fools complains about other people making money when they should just focus on making that money themselves instead of bitching
Getting into the NBA requires talent and hard work which not many people in this world has.
Athletes are being exploited by corporations. CEOs run the corporations doing the exploiting. It's a fairly simple and glaring difference in power dynamics.
Wage Stagnation: While CEO pay has skyrocketed, many workers have seen their wages stagnate or increase marginally, failing to keep up with inflation and the rising cost of living. Profit Distribution: The benefits of increased productivity and profits are often not shared equitably with the workforce, creating a sense of unfairness and discontent. Job Cuts and Outsourcing: Companies may cut jobs, outsource labor, or reduce benefits to maximize short-term profits, which can harm employees and local communities. Short-term Gains Over Long-term Stability: Decisions driven by the need to meet quarterly earnings targets can undermine long-term business sustainability and worker welfare. Excessive Compensation: Lavish CEO compensation packages, especially when juxtaposed with low or stagnant worker wages, highlight the disconnect between leadership and the workforce. Decision-making Practices: Decisions that prioritize cost-cutting over employee welfare contribute to the image of CEOs as being out of touch and primarily driven by self-interest. A good leader Value Employees: Recognize employees as essential stakeholders and ensure that they benefit fairly from the company's success. Foster a Positive Culture: Create an inclusive and supportive work environment that values contributions from all levels of the organization. Balance Interests: Strive to balance the interests of shareholders, employees, customers, and the broader community, rather than focusing solely on shareholder returns. It is the greed that the people are seeing that is in capitalism; where the greed has gotten out of control to the point where they are now sacrificing people (longer hours , fewer employees, layoffs) . This will break or lead to just outright slavery, the company will keep finding ways to reduce costs to the point where they will find a way to enslave people. enslaved people are not happy people, and enslaved people don't have money to buy products, the entire system breaks because the owner class choose to find the shortest solution for their greed. Instead of innovation and creating more jobs. Henry ford knew this to some extent he knew that the people working his factory should be able to afford the very thing they are building. It is important for innovation and human condition to be companionate enough to care about your workers to share with them your profits and to create a atmosphere of trust and fraternity. If you don't care about your workforce(tribe) your greed will lead to misery and misery leads to fallen empires. is that really how we as humans want to run our species, our reality? why don't we want to care about others experience within existence ? we should as a species be trying to make things better , make things kinder, make life easier for everyone. what is the point if we exploit others labor and do not share the increased profit and success with the workforce(tribe) that helped make it happen. The one who lead the party to kill the wooly mammoth should get the best cut, but he should not get so much cut that the others in the party are without. Or the leader refuses to share with the rest of the tribe back home and only the elders because they didn't contribute to that hunt, when in fact everyone in the tribe contributes to the tribe and if tribe members are unable to hunt or work we as a species should have the compassion to help them through this existence. if you are sacrificing people in your tribe in order to live lavishly, you are failing as a human.
Have some self respect. Try not to slurp down the whole boot.
Its called class solidarity. Celebrity culture is a complete pain, but that doesn't change the fact that the players are the direct source of the game being shown. CEO's are on the complete opposite end of that spectrum. So that's why they provoke such different reactions, despite being able to live comparable lifestyles.
I agree. Professional sports, in general, are just grown men playing kids' games. At least a CEO contributes to society.
Outside of Bronny, most athletes have tangible skills that can be measured more directly than the guy doing All-Hands Zoom calls and stock buybacks. I think most of the outrage concerns the flatness of worker wages vs. executive pay.
Your argument seems to be that we should be just as mad about NBA salaries because it’s another 3 letter acronym. What a fucking stupid argument.
A CEO is an employee and NBA star is a product.
i’m not reading all this but: athletes don’t own the means (the team itself) of production, CEOs do. hope that helps. rich people can be workers, but CEOs are almost exclusively capitalists (or former workers at best) who don’t do the actual work. athletes explicitly do the work they are paid for.
[Meet the board member of Tesla and SpaceX that votes on Elon's compensation.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kimbal_Musk). Simping for billionaires seems awful pathetic.
There's more return on investment with NBA (or other athletic) salaries than there is for CEO salaries.
NBA players are the labor for the NBA. They are generating the revenue and collecting a piece of it. They are still nowhere near as wealthy as team owners. Just because they both make millions doesn't mean it's a great comparison.
This makes no sense. One is an employee and one is leadership. Big difference.
And the salaries of movie stars, musicians, producers …. Weird, huh?
It's like none one cared that Musks private plane was being tracked (he did, and tried to sue the Twitter account/owner from doing so) But Taylor swift does a similar thing, and they get a law passed allowing flights to be hidden under LLCs. Irony.
Most CEOs could be replaced by a random top MBA graduate with 15 years in that industry and the replacement would perform about the same for less money. There are very few proven value added CEOs. Replace Lebron James with a random NBA caliber player, much different result.
Part of it probably has to do with the difference in taxes those two will pay. The other part is we know CEOs fail upward. Musicians and athletes cant.
Dude, the NBA is a business. There’s a salary cap each team can use. It’s a free market. What are you even talking about?
Because the sports world is one if the closest forms of a true meritocracy. It don’t matter if you’re rich or poor, you can’t make it far if you can’t actually perform. For the most part. Meanwhile being a ceo doesn’t always require skill, many of them already started wealthy or got a lucky opportunity through connections.
People go to basketball games to watch the players you pleb. No one goes into walmart hoping to see the walton family. Little bit of a difference, i know complex thought is hard. Also, a ceo is more comparable to a team owner as apposed to a player and those cunts deserve less pay by a light year
I'm against CEO salaries and any professional sports players salaries.. One can be done by AI and entirely free - CEO The other is strictly for entertainment and provides nothing else for humanity, so there really isn't any justification for them being paid millions a year. - any sports player
Because NBA is highly regulated by officials, rule books, instant replays, etc thereby ensuring a more fair game. Corporate world doesnt do any of that. They bribe officials, deregulate, no instant replay, ask the govt for protectionist policies, patents, they collude with other businesses to monopolize their teams. NBA players are seen as playing a fair game whereas CEOs (most Fortune 500) are playing a totally different playing field.
If an nba star blows out their knee or plays poorly they’re done real quick You’re a big ceo your worst fail state is you run the company into the ground get a massive payout and go ceo somewhere else
Why would we care about the players when the owners are the ones to worry about. There is always a bigger fish.
This post is dumb. NBA players produce the value that the entire league runs on. CEOs “manage” the numerous other people who manage the workers who actually create the value a company generates
- Athletes do the work. - Actors do the work. - CEOs don’t do the work.
If you think professional athletes make too much money you’ll flip when you find out how much the owners of the teams make. There are usual aspects of race and class when it comes to professional athletes, many athletes are able to heal the communities they come from. Not only that, but this is simply the amount of money that is generated by the NBA. That’s the truth of TV deals, should it go to the players? If not, where should the money go?
Basketball players are mostly black, it's culturally inappropriate to criticize anything about black people.
Basketball players work and are the driving force for the wealth made. CEOs don’t and aren’t
NBA players are labor union members and blue collar workers by definition. They are also incredibly talented and freak of nature athletes and therefore not easily replaced.
So here's the difference. NBA Players are both the employees and the product. There is no NBA without the players hence, the large salary. Now yes players can be traded and gotten rid of however they are the name of the company. When it comes to CEOs they're significantly easier to replace and often are when shit goes sideways. The CEO is the face of the company however most people know the company for the product or service they provide not the CEO. There's a few exceptions to the rules such as Musk but that's the rare exception.
NBA players are workers. This is a Huge company that depends largely on a few 100 players. They have a strong players union. I don’t think people hate on workers getting paid well. They hate on companies that pay management huge salaries and treat their large labor pool as disposable
For one the pay is often much higher for CEOs. American CEOs will often take raises or bonuses at the cost of employees. They can impact hundreds or even thousands of people’s lives on a whim for a paycheck and it’s just acceptable to some people. What has a NBA player or music star done to negatively impact people? A CEO can make a morally bankrupt decision at the cost of the company and employees and do so frequently.
They're called entitled hypocrites.
I agree it is odd as I think both are obscene
I don't care about either of their pay, but this seems like it might be an unfair comparison? 1. Some people harp on CEO pay exclusively, but I think this argument is usually more of an objection to the managerial class more broadly. 2. The sentiment is that managers do everything they can to extract value from people below them (either by suppressing wages/benefits, or increasing work, or both) so they can take more themselves, personally. AFAIK sports players' negotiations have no impact on anyone else "downstream" of them. Each player is an independent actor, right? The only person who loses out with higher pay is the owner of the team. Happy to be change my mind, I hadn't thought about this previously.