Steve Ballmer is set to make $1 billion a year for doing nothing | CNN Business
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Comments108https://edition.cnn.com/business/investing/steve-ballmer-one-billion-dividends/index.htmlOpen linkView original on slrpnk.net
That's a great salary even if divided between 10,000 people.
Fuck billionaires, leeches
That's 100k for those in the back. Really puts this greed into perspective, there is absolutely no reason for any individual to be hoarding this much money. For many people that would literally be life changing
It’s a mental disorder, similar to hoarding, and they all need psychological help.
And the saddest thing about it is that a lot of people admire it.
Loads of people admire people with anorexia and bulimia, doesn’t change that there is something wrong with their brain.
If you want to stretch it a little further, this would be enough to very comfortably support just shy of 74,000 students in Australia per year.
That's roughly an extra third of what our government offers right now.
This is exactly why you do a progressive tax rate that charges a huge percent (50+) for every penny earned over 20 million.
They can still get these massive bonuses, but get would be better off putting that money into wages that aren’t taxed so much.
50% for 20 million sounds insane to me. I'd be clamoring for 75% or more. I'm in Ontario and people making something like 250000 CAD already have a marginal rate above 50% IIRC. Before anyone calls me a lazy commie, my marginal rate is in the mid 40s already, and I'm happy to do my part.
How do you feel about 37%?
Oh honey, that's so much more conservative than I'd tax. 100% over a million, easy.
They don't deserve huge bonuses so I'm not interested in letting them keep anything that insane. There should be a cap on income based upon the median wage or something IMO.
I’ll meet you in the middle at 75
I'd back tax them.
The UK tax bands will blow your mind.
Like 40% for anything over 50k. Which I'm fine with btw.
https://www.gov.uk/income-tax-rates
None of these people earn their fortunes in a way that is affected by income tax.
They're not taking billions in cold hard cash every year.
Ok, so capital gains tax then. It still kicks in at a fairly early point. Long before you're making millions.
https://www.gov.uk/capital-gains-tax/rates
It’s probably not bad when you factor in healthcare. Especially the middle class that doesn’t get free healthcare but also pays the same as the super wealthy.
We used to have that here in the US.
Thank you Reagan and Bush
Anybody else think there should be a money limit? Like at a certain point you get a message: Congratulations, you completed capitalism. Now every additional cent you make is going to be taxed at 100%
Oh absolutely, if we aren't replacing capitalism we need to install hard limits.
Developers developers developers developers
One of the only public statements he was right about.
YEEEEAAAAAAARRERRGGGGGGGHHHHH!!
Okay, that too.
I would hate to see that guy when he’s constipated.
Billionaires gonna billionaire.
"Hustle and grind bro. Get that bread"
It doesn't matter if you hustle and bring every single day for the rest of your life, you will never have a billion dollars.
Save that $5 a day and put it in a mutual fund and in 10 years you'll make nothing because inflation will eat any growth you might have had
But giving someone at the bare minimum support from the state is apparently setting the wrong incentive. They say free money for doing nothing is communism and makes people lazy while giving a billinaire billlions for doing nothing is late capitalist doublespeak. I hope he suffocates on it.
This is free money in the way that it's a return on his investment. This has nothing to do with the state other than they will collect tax revenue on this distribution annually.
This should be a motivational post to get people investing. heck of a retirement payout this guy's getting.
Totally, because people who are struggling just love to take risks with their money.
What risk? Market goes up, the Rich ain't gonna let that stop so you may as well catch on the coat tails.
Past performance is not indicative of future earnings. Consult an investment professional or just send me your banking details. Same same.
it goes it goes it goes
GUILLOTINE
DECAPITATORS DECAPITATORS DECAPITATORS!
No no no just make him work on the linux kernel
Leave Linux alone. Send that fucker to build iPads.
To put it into perspective: If you would earn 5000$ every day (not per month, per day) and you had started with that when Columbus discovered America, you still had not 1 billion!
If you made $61k per day for a 45 year career, you would make ~$1bn.
So, that's like a decent yearly salary PER DAY, from the age of 20 to the age of 65.
If $61k per year can support someone for a year, that career would support 365 people for 45 years.
And that's just $1bn over a full career.
If you earned $1bn per year, that could support 16,425 per year on a $61k salary. Thats a town of people.
lol
The CEO of Brave is a would-be Ballmer; he uses his wealth to fight against gay rights.
It doesn't say anything about what he is doing now? Seems like he was sorry about previous donations and wanted to fix it? Is he still up to the same shit?
He was also an anti-masker.
Stop protecting yourself and let us protect you.
Ballmer further ruined Microsoft and gets rewarded. Gotta love capitalism
Capitalism literally rewards and enforces narcissism, sociopathy, exploitation, greed, destruction, and violence.
Cool system guys.
ITT: a bunch of people who don't understand how dividends work on stock ownership. He's not collecting a salary, Microsoft is not actively paying him, he's just an investor who owns a shit ton of stock.
Or, a bunch of people who are over the inequality in our world regardless of how the person comes by the money.
I don’t care if Microsoft pays him a salary or not, hoarding that much wealth is a mental illness that can only be cured by a guillotine
Do you prescribe this medicine to all mental illness?
Billionaires don't want to work anymore.
Somebody should've just told Marx about the difference between salary and capital ownership!
No need, they exist and you've already lost...
Rape already exists. Based on your reasoning here, anyone who says rape shouldn't exist 'already lost.' So I guess we should get rid of those anti-rape laws, right?
So you're saying he'll be making a billion dollars a year for doing nothing?
Income is income, and billionaires already have too much of it. Not everyone enjoys taking it rough from corporate America.
The only people who should have stake in a company are those who work there.
Wait... But then the stock would be virtually worthless...
Isn’t that the “doing nothing” part of the title?
And? Details are irrelevant. I still want him to choke and die.
The stock market is perverse.
It is supposed to be a tool that allows people to support promising ventures that they believe in, and allows them to profit from the venture if it is successful.
Instead it's a race to the bottom, where companies have a feduciary duty to their investors to make them as much profit as possible. This is the ultimate driver of enshittification.
Adam Smith was a smart guy, but he never saw Milton Friedman coming.
He’s always been a tool
The guy was just Bill Gates' roommate. He's white privilege personified.
Did he visit Epstein's island too?
That speech was worth $100m/yr, max
Time for the guillotine.
s/make/steal from Microsoft’s workers/
Well, to be fair, the man is very good at nothing.
Didn't this guy fuck up a bunch of things at Microsoft? Even as a failure, you can be billionaire.
He's the reason Linux is so dominant in the server space and has no signs of slowing down.
He won’t be doing nothing; he’ll be doing tons of cocaine. He actually has enough money now to attach 3 or 4 more functioning noses to his face.
This is perfectly fine, but an extreme wealth tax would be wrong.
If it keeps him doing nothing, it might actually be worth it...
So much for the excuse “honey, I’m working late again”
He also fucking sucked at his job. Isn't that wonderful?
That's a lot of cocaine.
Go Steve! It’s your payday!
See this is the problem here. We have these insane examples of wealth that should really have been fixed with a 100% tax rate over something reasonable. But since we didn't do that we have the other extremes, calling for tearing down other streams of income or demanding you should work the rest of your life for a wage vs investments. Neither of these positions offer much value here. Really we should be pushing for voters to turn out and create a reasonable tax rate. Take WA for example and how they created a 7% tax on over 250k annual for capital gains. Could that be more? Maybe. Could it be a sliding scale up? Sadly no due to the state constitution atm. As an engineer there I might be in a position that pays that, which I'm OK with, but no way I could buy a house here or live comfortably without working if there's no investment income allowed. And I don't really want to spend the rest of my life working for shitty tech companies.
well played.
Yeah great job being the college roommate of a future monopolist, we all should have picked parents like his.
Um.... This article is clickbait. It's like If I invested super early at AAPL(Apple) and now have a billion dollars in Apple shares. Sure, I'm a billionaire, it doesn't mean I didn't do anything to get it.
Stupid article.
Actually that pretty much sounds like you didn't really do anything to get it and just profited off the Apple employees' hard work.
Ah yes the classic "providing capital doesn't count" How do you imagine businesses should get initial funding if not via investors? And how much should a person/corporation be allowed to profit from that initial funding?
If they didn't hold the capital hostage from the doers of the world, laborers, as is the point of capitalism, it would be a lot easier.
Instead the do nothing capitalists keep the vast majority of the value generated, and provide just enough for the people that made it to subsist. It's a shame so many they would never let within 100 feet of their clubs, towers, or compounds defend their con.
Not surprising though, we're propagandized through the media they own and the curriculum they influence to deify the con-game that is capitalism. We were conquered by the contemporaries of the traveling snake oil salesmen of old.
Sorry what's your alternative? I'm guessing communism?
In that system how do you efficiently allocate capital? Do you use a command economy?
I'm not deifying anything, it just seems that capitalism is the most efficient economic system we can come up with. And combined with regulation seems to produce pretty good results, see most of the better parts of Europe for example
A system which stores vast percentage of capital inert in the hands of a few entitled parasitic rapists is not "efficient".
Do you want to maybe suggest something practical? I'm not particularly interested in the relentless "capitalists are evil" meme. I am interested in hearing about alternatives with merit Also inert? Are these people really sitting on cash? Or are they investing in various parts of the economy?
t a x t h e r i c h At, say, 90% above 2m earnings and also bring in a generous estate tax - one which would trigger above some large value, say 10m$ so that a lucky rando with a house isn't hit, but someone with 9 digit net worth is.
And yes, they do sit on a ton of this cash. Buying yachts, flipping artworks and building bunkers in New Zealand aren't exactly productive investments. And yes, a large amount gets invested here and there but it would still be better to deconcentrate this.
"Everything I don't like is communism." There's always one of you morons in every thread. I'm sure this comment will change everyone's mind.
By all means suggest something else. It feels like 90% of the time people that are anti capitalism either suggest communism or don't understand that they just want capitalism with tighter regulation What's your suggestion?
Not GP, but I'd love to see them replaced entirely with crowdfunding. So the public would pay based on our expected benefit from new structures, instead of paying people who own structures. Much of the initial investment is just paying off someone else's mature investment.
Rather than just capping profits with a number, we should be addressing the problems that cause it to exist at all. We're already voting on people who vote on bailouts; might as well just cut out the middlemen who "provide" capital.
How would you crowd fund a company that isn't promising a specific set of products? Normally the way we do crowd funding is to offer essentially a pre sale of a product. Sure sometimes people just put forward cash because they really want the product to exist but it isn't the norm But for a company that will be a service provider what incentive exists to fork over potentially millions of dollars? In a crowd funding scheme you expect no profit share so why would you invest in them?
Compared to in this case buying a percentage of a company early on to provide them with capital on the basis that you may make money in the future
Also those bailouts while somewhat distasteful were played back to the government with interest
The initial cost would be significantly lower because there'd be no previous owner to pay. Property values right now include the net present value of all expected future rents. The incentive to participate in the crowdfund is that the increased likelihood of the event happening is worth more to you than your share of money invested (like any other assurance contract).
Compared to buying a percentage of the company, it eliminates unearned rent; nobody is getting paid more than it costs to bring the factor into production.
Not all of them, no. Especially in 2020 many were forgiven. If it was a profitable endeavor (counting opportunity cost vs just investing elsewhere), then the private sector would have done it using collateral. And we're still paying for those bailouts today [gestures at prices].
I'm confused, you want to have people crowd fund R&D to increase the odds a product goes to market. And then expect no profit on the back of that investment? After the potentially huge initial cost does the company then sell the product at cost? Or do they make a profit now?
Can you give an example of a bailout you disagree with? Pretty much all bailouts I'm aware of recoup their costs Also the reason private equity doesn't bail out these companies is that unlike a government they may not be able to weather a significant period where they aren't getting a large cash flow, as they need to stay afloat as well. A government on the other hand is better prepared to recoup costs over time, and will do so if it means that depositors funds are safe. They are much more likely to let a hedge fund just fold as the participants are capable of withstanding such losses
R&D used to be done at universities for the benefit of all. It still often is.
Why should it all be in private hands?
The only things that warrant investors profiting off their investment at all are the risk of not getting the money back and the opportunity cost of not having the money for other things while it is tied up in the investment so I would say a reasonable profit would be somewhere in the order of magnitude of those and not in the current "infinitely for all time" order of magnitude.
How are you possibly measuring opportunity cost? This is the opportunity. All you can do is use it to buy goods and services or invest via lending in some form
Say you could quantify that and cap profits. What should happen with corporate profits then? After you've "paid" the original investors? Does the owner of the company now reabsorb their shares? And if we instead allocate profits to the workers, do we also allocate losses? Do workers just straight up not get paid if the company loses money one year?
What amount of capital has Ballmer provided? Please give us a number in dollars. You can round it off.
Also, what amount of capital would not be provided if Ballmer didn't increase his wealth by $1 billion off of it? Again, you can round it off.
Actually quite interesting in the case of Ballmer as he was an employee compensated via stock rather than straight up cash
You'd consider that an investment as he was investing his time to be a business manager while being compensated probably less in cash that would be normal for the position
So as early Microsoft didn't have the cash on hand, or didn't want to give up that cash they could use elsewhere they gave equity as compensation
How do you suggest we should remove this situation? Should we not allow compensation in the form of equity? Or should ownership of equity not exist generally?
Ballmer also got Microsoft their first major contract back in the day. He did contribute massively to what MS is today. To that dollar value? No, no one contributes THAT MUCH. But it's not like he wasn't extremely impactful.
I am shocked that an OG Silicon Valley business owner and right hand man of the creator of the most popular software on the planet is till taking his cut of the shares. SHOCKED!
Doing nothing 🤦♂️
Labor keeps the world running. Labor makes the discoveries. Labor invents.
Capitalism just holds the resources hostage from labor, allowing access to ill gotten resources in exchange for almost everything they produce, rinse and repeat.
You swoon over con-men.
I’m not fully abreast of Ballmer’s dealings, but I know he’s spending a shit ton on pro basketball:
https://time.com/139577/former-microsoft-ceo-buys-clippers-2-billion/
https://www.nba.com/news/clippers-owner-steve-ballmer-closes-deal-forum
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/19/clippers-owner-steve-ballmer-announces-new-1point2-billion-intuit-dome.html
https://variety.com/2022/biz/news/steve-ballmer-la-clippers-clippervision-jamal-crawford-baron-davis-1235405566/
One can judge the utility of such ventures, but it’s undeniable that capital is being used (not held hostage) and jobs being created. It takes a lot of people to build a stadium.
Microsoft laid off 16,000 people in 2023 alone. How many pro basketball jobs did he create in return?
https://news.microsoft.com/leadership/?section=board-members
https://news.microsoft.com/leadership/?section=board-members
Ballmer’s not on either of those lists. Not sure how you can put those layoffs on him.
He owns a 4% stake in the company. He could easily have used his sway to prevent layoffs.
Which software was that again? Can you please elaborate on Steve Balmer's accomplishments.