The execs get paid a lot - but there's not that many of them, and there's 200k people at MSFT making an average salary (with benefits) >$200k. That's >$40B per year. The execs don't take home >$2B per year.
Satya made <$60M last year. There's not 35 execs at MSFT making the same amount of money or higher. There's 18 others, and they make a lot less money on average.
This 10k layoff, at an average salary of 190,302, is about $2b a year. So yeah not quite - but for them to suffer no consequences is still pretty gross.
This is in part, due to the fact that he has nothing to do with Microsoft anymore.
This part of your statement has no relevance given MS's position, even taking into account the current market.
MS as a company is in no danger here. In fact, they are doing quite well.
You hire people if you need them, fire them if you don't. It's really that simple.
Your employer doesn't owe you a job.
Do you have any actual numbers on the number of execs vs workers and their salaries?
Plus, every sale of the company's stock by a key executive is immediately reported to the SEC and publicly available on the SEC and company's websites. Wall street watches this like a hawk. If any key exec unloads more than a few percent of their entire holdings at any one time, it will hurt the stock price pretty substantially. Effectively, it makes it so the CEO can't sell a lot their stock at once while they are CEO.
The big numbers you see for CEO compensation for this year are largely stock options that were granted years prior which vested this year. Almost all of Satya's compensation is performance-based instead of guaranteed. The company he leads must deliver sustained profitable growth over the long-term for his comp to be worth a lot. The fact it's worth a lot this year is almost entirely due to him already delivering on his commitments to shareholders in the past. Keep in mind that the average public company CEO is in the CEO job less than five years. Satya is in the minority that is succeeding. Due to the high visibility of the CEO role, the majority who don't succeed have a high likelihood of never earning significant compensation again.
It's not how business works.
You hire people if you need people, and you pay them the least you can get away with, so you maximize profits - because long ago, you raised money with the promise to the people you raised the money from that you would do this, and you have a Fiduciary obligation to do so...
We agree then that employees should put in the least amount of work that they can get away with, right? Fair's fair.
