Memes in general for me are better as comedy devices. I am always very skeptical when they try to make factual arguments for something. The sources and/or methodologies used are almost never cited. Many times it seems like they will put forth one or two ideas or statements that hold up and an additional one that does not. This is a pretty classic propaganda approach as it gets a bad idea 'validated' by some good or ok looking items. No one checks out all of the items. This meme in particular gives me heartburn I guess. It's classist (those people are screwing us!), inaccurate in how it posits the argument and in doing so, muddies up what I think is an important conversation for us as a country, and as a moral & ethical people. It is not my intention to defend or attack levels of wealth here, only to try and throw some light on how they work in some cases.
You have the very idea of fairness being challenged; how much is enough, how much is ok, and what does it mean? Are people to blame, or is "the system" to blame? (aren't people really "the system" though?) And to some extent if we are asking those questions - who decides the answers? That to my mind is a more important conversation. How we can discuss it while we wave pitch forks and torches at each otfher? Got 10 min? Lets take a look.
So getting to work, the meme says:
If you worked every day from the time Columbus sailed to America...
(actual date: August 3, 1492)
Starting on October 5 2023, that is 194,006 days.
/365 is 531.523 years.
"making $5,000 a day" (words matter - you are Earning $5,000 a day) x 194,006 days is $970,030,000 Just 30 million short. They seem to have picked their date in the past fairly carefully. 5,994 more days and you would be a billionaire, about 16.4 years or 3% more time.
$5,000 a day x 365 = $1,825,000 a year. (assuming you get paid for all 365 days since thats the example given) $625 an hour. It is also pretty clear we have also stuffed our money in a pillowcase for much of this. A real person would presumably invest. May 17, 1792 is the date of the Buttonwood agreement, which was the start of the US Stock exchange. By 1792 you would have been earning 1.8 million a year for 300 years, or $540 million. With that $540 million compounded at an average of 9% a year from 1792 until today, you would make the Forbes list easily, likely topping it. The online calculators can't handle 300 years as an input, and I am too lazy to make a spreadsheet for it. In fact within 8-10 years of the stock market opening you would probably be a Billionaire. (I figure since we are living from 1492 to the present day we're a vampire anyhow, so I am assuming this person just keeps living!) By the rule of 72 you will double your holdings every 8 years (at the historical average 9% return as you re-invested your dividends)
Ok, so assuming no interest bearing investments, your salary getting saved in a pillowcase for 531.5 years is ~ $970 million dollars. Whether they sandbagged the date or not, the point is made. You can't really get there on salary alone. And no one does as far as I am aware. So it's a bit of misdirection. "Look, he didn't earn it. It's not possible to. " is what I hear them saying. So they must be cheating, right? That's the headline. And while we schlubs are working paycheck to paycheck. Jethro? Git ma shotgun...
Then they appear to claim in the 4th panel that this is also still less than Jeff Bezos "makes" in a week.
Well what does he earn in a week? Lets take a look at Mr B since he's the example here.
His current salary is $31,145 a week.
So they are clearly adding in stock appreciation here? or what? They are claiming, it would appear, that Jeff Bezos makes over $970 million a week. Hey, they're only off by $970 million. What's the big deal? [Personally I think this is just bad writing on their part - I think they really meant "...at $5,000 a day you would still earn less each week than he does" which is a lot closer than how I expect they meant it to read it as written. On a pure salary basis, JB is earning $6,229 a day currently but he earned a lot less in the past originally taking only a $64,222 annual salary which rose to $81k later. $81k is $1,620 a week @50 weeks. The answer is 'it depends'. ]
How does that stock stuff work?
Well, he starts out with stock worth $0 a share. But you have to issue stock to raise money.
The stock is issued on July 5th, 1994. (the founding date of Amazon)
The company went public in May 1997. Now 3 years is a very short time to go from founding to an IPO. He happened to fall into the internet boom. Like Bill Gates fell into the PC revolution. The right thing at the right time. An accident in time and space. In the colorful language of Wall Street, 'he stepped in sh*t'.
He owns between 10-12% of the company today, depending on which site you look at.
He has 64,588,418 shares of stock.
His holdings are worth an estimated $121 Billion as I write this. (Oct 2023) The valuation of the company is a function of how well it is doing, not his salary, & not his net worth.
The whole thing is interesting because all through history we have innovation leading to great concentrated wealth and then it flattens out again. This is not new 'internet' stuff. This is the plow. Irrigation. Mining. Metal. The stirrup. Writing. Math. Movable type. Railroads. Oil. Cars. Airplanes. Computers. Software. Smart phones. Social Media. Crypto. AI...
Seeing someone with so much though feels like a violation to our sense of fairness. Why should he have so much when others go hungry or homeless? For that matter, why should you and I have what we have? Why do I get to sleep in a comfy bed in a safe place with a full stomach and safe, healthy kids? We allow ourselves enough latitude to realize our dreams. How do we judge the dreams of others? (Should we and if so, when should we and who should do that?)
The big numbers in Bezos' net worth are all stock valuation, what we called "unrealized" in securities accounting since it has not yet been sold. You can brag about how your mint super rare '69 Yenko Camaro is worth $150,000, but until someone actually buys it for that amount, it is unrealized. You can't trade stock for a bottle of cheap wine at the grocery store. (maybe you can trade the Camaro though) It also isn't salary. It is not coming from the cash flow the company uses to pay their employees. It is not something he "hoarded". (another word I see thrown around a lot)
Finally, it is also all at risk - if the company goes bankrupt or runs into some other challenge, the value can drop quickly and all that unrealized value will evaporate. Just any ex-Enron shareholder about that.
Some of these memes seem to suggest that the CEO is taking from everyone else. That seems like a gross misunderstanding of how compensation works. It is what Hegel might have referred to as a 'peasant world view' - a world of limited good. Your success only comes at my expense - it's a zero-sum game. The capitalist world view is a world of unlimited good - we can both succeed. Reality is a probably a mix, but there are an ever increasing number of jobs and people to do them and money to pay them with. There are more people and more money right now than every before in history. (roughly - here is a chart of the M2 supply historically. Outside of it's recent dip, it has always gone up. https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/money-supply-m2 ) Poverty is also near an all time low so we're doing something right? The highest US poverty rate was 22%, measured during the 1950s. I would never have guessed that, which is part of what I enjoy about trying to put thoughts on paper and fact checking myself.
Stock options are used for a number of reasons in lieu of bigger salaries.
They are resilient to changes in the company's cash flow. Salaries are a bit dangerous in the sense that they are locked in. Bonuses can vary, but salaries are a fixed cost so you want to be careful with them. You don't want to build in costs you can't carry through rough times. You can't cut salaries when times are lean. You have to cut people to do that. Normal, emotionally healthy humans don't want to fire people. It's awful.
They are a retention mechanism - you have option grants but you don't get it all now, you might vest some amount each month over the next four years. You stay at your job because you will forfeit the shares you have not been granted yet if you leave - and you still have to purchase your options at the strike within a set time after leaving or lose them too. I see recruiting letters where the recruiter's client offers to pay a one time fee to make the employee square if they give up options to change jobs. Worst case you get terminated and need to come up with a bunch of cash to pay for your options at the same time you have just lost your job. Good times. Did I mention this is risky stuff?
Stock Options are not taxed when they are given. Technically, you still have to purchase them for the issue price. This is why they are called "options" - they are an option to buy stock at a certain price. So if the company grants me 10,000 shares of stock at a 1.85 strike, I need to come up with $18,500 to purchase them. Then I can sell them later, ideally for some share price above the $1.85 I just paid. That difference in price is my profit. You don't pay taxes on them until you sell them. I don't have to buy them while I work there, I can, but I do not have to. You'll pay taxes on the profit based on the holding period between the purchase and the sale, just like other stocks. (Long Term or Short Term capital gains) This tax treatment has evolved over the years. (see link below) I am not a tax professional and nothing here is tax advice, just to be super duper clear. I like to use houses as an analogy. Your home may appreciate well above what you paid for it, but you are not taxed until you sell it. It could also lose value (would you get a refund?), or in extreme cases the valuation could rise so much you could be forced to move because you don't have the cash to pay the taxes on the appreciation you have not profited from. Think of locals in a place like Nantucket for example where even a basic shack is $1 Million or more. You are not cheating on your taxes, you are simply not getting taxed for unrealized gains or losses. Money you do not actually have.
Stock Options are also about alignment - if everyone is working for the same goal (the best possible share price) it should be a win-win: we're all rowing in the same direction and you don't get the moral-killing feeling that you are working very hard so the folks down the hall can get rich.
Stock options are hardly new; they date back to the 1950s: https://secfi.com/learn/history-of-employee-stock-options
If your company is privately held you can't just sell stock whenever you want because there is no market. You might also have to have board or other shareholder approvals. (There are companies that will loan you money against your options however) If the company is public, there may still be lockup periods after the IPO when you can't sell. And as CEO (for example) if you sell a bunch of public stock, Wall Street traders will be buzzing to find out who this "large natural seller"* is and why they are selling. You might even tank the stock if you do it clumsily. I mean if everything is so rosy, why sell?
* A seller who has this stock in inventory and is selling a lot of it. This is as opposed to someone borrowing the stock to short it or doing option trades etc.
So it is no mystery that Jeff B started out with a lot of stock, and when it was originally issued it was worthless. He had no sales, no customers, lots of nothing. He probably just had a pitch deck about his big idea.
Something like 90% of startups fail, so tax laws and bankruptcy laws are set up to give entrepreneurs a break. If the cost of failure is too high, no one will try. This is one of those times. I found my new startup and issue 20 million shares of stock for a company with a 0 valuation and have no tax consequences if I file the right forms and I can check the right boxes for industry and so on. Now I want another person to work with me on this new venture but I can't pay them anything like their market salary, so I give them an options grant to make them whole - or hopefully much better - in the long run. And the reality is that stock I have issued has no value - there is no market for it, often no cash or products or IP or even Goodwill. It's a piece of paper. If you read the Y-Combinator posts on startups, the basic idea is you work 10X as hard to make these bigger paydays in shorter time horizons. From my own experience, that is more or less on target except the most common scenario is that you work 10X as hard and fail. Good times. We only see the winners in the paper but they are a tiny fraction of the activity.
So getting back on track, between 7/5/94 and today Jeff's remaining stock is worth about $121 a share, up from zero. That is 10,684 days. (to October 5 2023)
Divide his $121 billion by 10,684 days and you wind up with a time averaged $11,325,346.31 a day. Which is $79,277,424.19 a week. Even if you move the date forwards 3 years to the IPO, you still are nowhere near your $970 million. So I would say box # 4 in the meme is dead wrong. (Did they just write it wrong?) There is the bad idea, mixed in with the "good" one. (which is 3% off of being wrong as well) "Vladimir Lenin likes this"... But it also makes the point clear that salary is not how anyone becomes a billionaire. But that really shouldn't be a surprise.
The leverage of all that stock can complicate things like understanding income and value - if the stock goes up 5%, 5% on 121 billion is about $6 billion. Unrealized, but still impressive. But you could also claim that he made $6 billion in a week (or whatever period) which he didn't (it's unrealized) As I write this his stock is down about $60 a share this year (Oct 2023); from around $180 a share to around $120. About 1/3 of its value was wiped out. On paper. 33% on 121 billion is around $40 billion. Is it really gone? Maybe, maybe not. The stock can go back up. Or not. So you can spin it different ways. Did he actually "make" it or "lose" it? Until he sells it, nothing real has happened. Until he sells there are no taxes, so you could go to press saying he earned $6 billion this week and paid no taxes. It's not a complete lie but it is very misleading. If you're a home owner and your home has gone up 20% in value, have you paid any income tax on that appreciation? No. It is unrealized. It's really the same idea. You will be taxed when you sell your home. You are not cheating on your taxes, you are being taxed on a conservative basis essentially - the actual sales price when it happens. "Make them pay their fair share" actually has some nuance to it. Are we going to tax unrealized gains on company stock, and if so, which stocks (public or only private?) and when. What kind of relief would we give shareholders who pay taxes on huge unrealized gains but then lose big later on? Many questions to answer for sure. Will we also tax unrealized gains on "real property" such as homes, cars, art and so on? There is a lot more to the tax picture of course, this is not intended to an analysis of taxation, only a quick intro to how many billionaires build their fortunes.
Growth Feeds Growth
The stock market historically returns about 9% annually (averaged out across wars, depressions and everything else and assuming you re-invest your dividends). 9% on $121 billion is $10.89 Billion. A year. $907.5 Million a month, give or take. You and I won't earn that in our lifetimes. Unimaginable numbers, but it's the same rate we get, just applied at a larger scale. Is compound interest the problem? That goes back to ancient Babylon. Interest on interest is a very old problem, apparently dating back to domesticated cows. #GotMilk? During the last election cycle one of my HS classmates was alarmed that Mike Bloomberg had burnt through $250 million on his election attempt. At the time he was worth something like 66 Billion; 9% on 66 billion? 5.9 Billion. A year. Net net, $250 million was lunch money for him. And he probably has a variety of private investments in art, real estate, private equity, hedge funds and so on so he may do a lot better than 9%. It's a log curve, a hockey stick based on the assets at work. If I have a dollar earning 5% interest annually, that's only a nickel. If I have a million dollars earning 5% though, that's $50,000.
How much is "enough"?
With anything approaching about $5-$10 million in investable liquid assets (not including your house) you really can live about as well as you want to in the US and not have to work. In the colorful language of 'the street', you have your "f*ck you money"; no one can make you do anything you don't want to - in theory. With between $250-$500k on tap annually (based on a 5% Fed Funds environment) pre-tax, before you do any work, I think it's pretty fair to say that. Statistically you are landing near the top 1% at that point ($652k annually is the official 1% number in 2023) The median household income in 2022 was $74,850 a year which again at our 5% bogey implies $1.5 million invested.
So then why do we single out billionaires as 'the problem'? It seems to be more of a philosophical ordeal. You are above the fray long before you are a billionaire. It's just a neat soundbite. I asked on a FB group once if they would be cool with me having only $990 million. Or $500 million. What about a paltry $50 million? At what dollar value do I go from "one of us" to "one of them"? No one seemed to know. (I am not in any of these categories, just to be clear) My point is that one does not need to be a billionaire to be crazy rich.
I also asked if I started and ran a business that did well and grew, is there a point at which I should stop growing the business? At which I should give every additional dollar away or turn away sales or stop hiring people? Again, no one seems to know.
Is it the implied ability of the super wealthy to affect elections? Is it their ability to influence business? Or government? It might be good to identify where we think things are not working properly. It's not to give anyone a hard time, its just to begin the process of getting to the next layer of the problem.
The flip side of this is (if you have ever run a business) you are always at risk. Popular tastes could change, the economy could change, a new competitor could rise up, you could be taken over, sued or many other scenarios. You are never really on "autopilot". You are always looking over your shoulder and planning your next move, or your next 3 if you are any good. If you share profits, can your employees handle the variations in income when you have lean years? (would they want to?) Would you rather bump up salaries but then do layoffs in lean times? Can you offer meaningful stock option grants to help share the wealth more effectively? If you screw up, all those people who depend on you - not just your family but your employees and their families, your vendors & partners, your landlord and more - will be hurt. It's a lot of pressure to shoulder. A startup I worked at went bankrupt and I spent months dealing with the fallout. It still hurts to think about decades later. At another company one of my hires did not want stock options, he just wanted salary. I failed to convince him otherwise. He probably wound up doing better because we got bought at a low price. But it could have gone the other way; we shared an office doing similar work and I might have made millions while he didn't. I have heard this has been a real issue at Microsoft, for example, where people in the same roles might have vastly different fortunes based on when they joined the company. There's a moral killer.
Who are our billionaires?
There are roughly 2,640 billionaires globally (2022). Of those, 14 are black. Of those 14, 2 are female and 8 are American.
Overall, 87.5% are men. 90% are over age 50 and around 64% are white. (There is your patriarchy stat in a nutshell.) If you guessed caucasian men over 50, you were correct.
Michael Jordan is a billionaire. So is Oprah Winfrey, Rhianna, Jay-Z, Tyler Perry, and at least 5 other people of color are as well. Is this the system working, or is this more "them" (billionaires, to be crystal clear) keeping us down? Statistically you would expect around 13.5% of US billionaires to be POC. Given that, we still have a lot of work to do. At least it can happen and is happening. That's something?
Net Net...
If you use the Forbes wealthiest list, 8 out of the top 10 made their money with stock options, not "stealing" from their employees by using enormous salaries. They built large & profitable companies that employ millions of people in aggregate. The other 2 (Bloomberg and Warren Buffet) are investors more than tech leaders although you could certainly argue that building Bloomberg the company was really a tech play.
Should employees get more stock options? How should that work?
Is it "fair" that founders who shoulder the bulk of the risk earn more overall? How much more is reasonable?
What do we do about employees who join at a later time when the most rapid growth is over? They take the least risk and see the least reward. Is that wrong?
What responsibility do companies and wealthy owners have, to do more social focused work to help their fellow human beings? Do we want the wealthy deciding who gets help and how?
...And a million other questions to answer. But step one is to get the facts as we understand them, as straight as we can. There are probably better ways to communicate this than memes.
To be cont'd. ?
Sources:
Black Billionaires (BOC?) https://ncrc.org/the-racial-wealth-divide-and-us-black-billionaires
Who are the black billionaires? https://www.ajc.com/news/atlanta-black-history/who-are-the-black-billionaires/PRWODTCBXNHZLLSQTZOHU5Y3B4/
Billionaires by gender: https://www.statista.com/statistics/778577/billionaires-gender-distribution/
America's Richest people, 2023: https://www.statista.com/statistics/201426/the-richest-people-in-america/
Where do Billionaires Live? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_number_of_billionaires
Columbus Sets Sail for America: https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/columbus-sets-sail/
The Buttonwood Agreement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buttonwood_Agreement
History of employee Stock Options: https://secfi.com/learn/history-of-employee-stock-options
The Emergence of compound interest: https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/799CB1D40CDD46F3010767BFC60F24DB/S1357321719000254a.pdf/the-emergence-of-compound-interest.pdf
Amazon Company info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_(company)
Stock Market Historical Returns: https://www.officialdata.org/us/stocks/s-p-500/1900
US Salary Data: https://www.fool.com/the-ascent/research/average-us-income/#:~:text=U.S.%20income%20by%20gender%3A%20The,income%20in%202022%2C%20at%20%24101%2C027.
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