It's encouraging to see that the community has done a pretty good job of substantive discussion here, given the flamebaity and ragebaity title.<p>A more interesting article about Abigail Disney came out a few weeks ago: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19524325" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19524325</a>
What people forget in the debate over public company 'CEOs' is that, when the price of disney shares goes up from $24 to $135, that is millions upon millions of peoples retirements that are that much more secure. So, I mean, would you pay $66 million to someone for a better retirement for others?<p>Now, I don't know the answer to this question, but this way of looking at the stock price of public companies is often lost on people of all political persuasions.<p>Another thing to keep in mind is that, Iger 'only' made $3million last year. Most of the money reported as 'income' is actually stock grants. $66mln disney stock is not a controlling share, and -- by tying up Iger's wealth in the company -- it aligns his incentives with those of the wealth he has been charged with managing. Nevertheless, Iger couldn't sell this much stock without either being accused of insider trading (since such a large sale would surely manipulate the stock price), and the SECs regulations on insider trading are very strict (they prosecute based on the appearance of insider trading). Thus, given that he can't actually sell the disney stock, it's a real disservice to say he made $Xmillion in disney stock, given that the stock has no immediate cash value to him.
CEOs make or break the company. The best analogy is to look at CEOs who didn't do well. Consider Paul Otellini at Intel who missed the mobile processor boat completely when Steve Jobs approached him. Or maybe consider Mark Hurd or Carly Fiorina of HP who ransacked the company by cost cutting measures and acquiring Compaq! Or maybe look at Nokia's CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo in 2008 who missed the entire smartphone wave!<p>Now assume each of these CEOs who failed massively made $5M/yr (very conservative estimate). Is Bob Iger 100x more than that given what he has done at Disney? From acquiring Marvel to BAMTech to having a streaming strategy laid out (and being executed on well) - Bob is definitely phenomenal and one of the core reason why Disney is in the position it is in terms of strategy and execution. Is that worth $66M/yr? Absolutely, in my opinion.
Disney's greatest sin is locking away our culture through lobbying Congress to extend copyrights. In my opinion it is a much greater problem than ridiculous CEO pay (and a super rich shareholder complaining about it)
Wikipedia says that Disney has 201,000 employees, so that's $328 for each employee he's responsible for. Alternatively, he makes .11% of what Disney brings in each year in revenue.<p>The scale of the company is absurd, but his compensation doesn't seem to out of whack for it.
> The 59-year-old, whose grandfather Roy O Disney co-founded the Walt Disney Company with his animator brother, inherited a share of her family’s wealth, and is reported to be worth $500m.<p>So I'm guessing she doesn't think her grandfather was worth that kind of money back in the day either...
From WikiPedia "Abigail E. Disney (born January 24, 1960) is an American documentary filmmaker, philanthropist, and activist known for her documentary films focused on social themes.".<p>Her background/experience does not make her an expert in employee compensation. Am I missing something to this, other than her family name, of course?
Counterpoints: Michael Jordan in basketball: without him millions wouldn’t watch the NBA, Gatorade and Nike wouldn’t have become the cultural juggernauts they are today...for all that he was only paid ~1 Billion. Tiger Woods in golf. Steph Curry made the sleepy warriors worth over 2 billion resulting in a 1.6 billion net worth increase for the owners. He has only recieved, for his efforts, maybe 100 million. Roger Goodell, as much as I hate him, has managed to screw over the working class nfl players with a settlement bordering on criminal, but the owners of NFL teams love him for it, they’ve all gotten billions of dollars more richer, and for all this Goodell has only been paid around 300 million.
Amazing how little anyone is mentioning that Abigail Disney who is worth half a billion dollars purely by virtue of being born rich May be on thin ice criticizing the lay of someone who actually works for a living. She says CEOs can say no to excessive comp but I don’t see her giving back 90% of her inheritance to charity which would still leave her with 50mm dollars! No I’m not defending excess CEO comp, the underpayment of workers, or wealth inequalty. I just find her to be a very strange and non self aware avatar for this movement.
It just sits oddly for me.<p>Her ancestors made a ton of money, and now she lives comfortably and is widely quoted in the media. Now she's 'pulling the ladder up' so the current CEO's kids won't get the same benefits.<p>Not that I don't think the salary is grossly excessive-- I definitely do. I just think she's an odd poster child for the protest voice.
I think it’s interesting to think Iger can work at this salary for another century, and still not come close to touching the wealth of Bezos (and god knows how much that wealth will increase over that time).
A good CEO is a force multiplier. Every single employee (and investor) in the company benefits in ways large and small for having a great CEO at the helm, and would suffer for having a worse CEO. In this sense, for a company with 200,000 employees (wow, that many?) is it worth $330 to each employee to have Iger at the helm? Of course the employees aren’t bearing the whole cost, so how about a third of that? I would certainly pay $100 out of my pocket once a year to work for a “Legendary” CEO versus a mediocre or merely good CEO.<p>We know that, unquestionably, a bad CEO (or the wrong CEO for the type of company or the growth cycle of the company) can <i>doom</i> that company despite the best and most heiroic efforts of the other employees. That is reason enough to invest highly in finding and compensating your CEO.<p>That is not to say that the converse is true; that a fantastic CEO can make a company grow despite poor effort from the other employees.<p>We can’t even say for sure that a fantastic CEO can be considered “responsible” for the success of their hardworking company, although there is certainly plenty of anecdotal data which shows certain decisions were extremely prescient or certain strategies which paid off handsomely that were driven by a CEO despite widespread skepticism.<p>It’s also worth considering what the CEO compensation would have been had a company not been so incredibly successful. Performance based options aren’t worth anything if the stock never rises.<p>Personally, I think the equity model is very flawed, but better than anything else we’ve tried. Speaking as a solo founder, the idea that I start out as 100% owner doing 100% of the work makes perfect sense.<p>But then you earn some revenue, or raise funding, and start hiring. As a company grows its success is the result of massive amounts of work done by a large group of talented workers who are largely compensated through cash salary, and maybe get token amounts of equity in the company.<p>But throughout this process of growth, the original founders may not even work for the company anymore. They may have driven it nearly to death and been kicked to the curb. But could still own double-digit percentage of the equity, and as a result become wealthy on the back of the company they own.<p>Why does being the Founder entitle a person to ownership of all that value creation that comes later?<p>I imagine a system where equity shares are distributed/generated through some work-valuation model on a monthly or annual basis, and those shares are either sufficiently diluted by the new share issuance over time, or actually have some sort of expiration function built into them. In short, workers should be getting a significant fraction of the company in new share issuance each year, but that ownership should not be perpetual.<p>This ongoing dillution would have pretty significant issues however on the flip side of the equation, which is the share valuation to investors who have paid to hold shares in return for future returns or expected capital appreciation. No investor would fund your startup and allow the levels of dilution I think would be required to make the system more fair toward workers. I do wonder if it’s possible to address this with two classes of shares somehow.
I fail to understand the root of the controversy here. I do realize that sixty-six million dollars is massive pay, but it is insignificant on a broader scale. Are some overcompensated? Of course. But a great CEO deserves great pay for having a rare talent: being an excellent leader. A bad CEO will sink a company; a great one will bring it success.<p>More importantly, it seems that much of the objection comes down to jealousy. If you took this guy's pay away and divided it among all disney employees, they would get about $325 a piece. He also arguably contributes orders of magnitude more value than a random disney employee. Finally, in this kind of jobs market, it seems that employees would have greater options. So I honestly ask: why are some so upset about this? I think he is indeed worth that much (based on disney's stock performance during his tenure, the market agrees). Is this just jealousy?<p>Finally, Bob Iger has gotten rich by working lucrative jobs. Mrs. Disney got rich by being born to a certain person. Hypocrite.<p>Downvoters care to comment?