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Not clicking a reddit link
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Fuck Steve Huffman sideways with an oil tanker
The side fell off
The starboard side boarded his star
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Its actually not complicated fundamentally. It’s some level of theft. The complexity is to hide this obvious fact.
Typically, ‘complex’ refers to fundamental properties and ‘complicated’ refers to distracting details. It is indeed very complicated (loopholes and such), just not terribly complex.
It’s not that we don’t understand.
It’s that… Fuck Spez.
If executives can be incentivized by outrageous sums of money, so can labor.
No, poor people don’t know how to properly use money. That’s what I’ve heard all my life. Bootstraps are yummy
Part of the problem is defining “rich people”.
To someone making $30K, $40K, $50K? Rich is $300K, $400K, $500K.
To someone who is legit rich? Multi-millions to billions rich? There’s no daylight between $500K and 50K. We’re all “the help” as far as they’re concerned.
And, yeah, their wealth allows them to operate on a different level the rest of us just can’t comprehend.
There are a few good books on the topic that everyone should read:
Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich–and Cheat Everybody Else
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/291700/perfectly-legal-by-david-cay-johnston/
Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You with the Bill)
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/300246/free-lunch-by-david-cay-johnston/9781591842484/
The Fine Print: How Big Companies Use “Plain English” to Rob You Blind
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/305192/the-fine-print-by-david-cay-johnston/9781591846536/
I don’t know, I can comprehend it just fine.
There’s a bunch of stuff in those books that I certainly never knew… for example:
"The IRS devised a formula for valuing personal use of corporate jets.
At the end of 2002, the rates for personal use of corporate planes were as low as $0.09/mile for small planes, and no more than $0.83/mile for the biggest jets.
For a personal trip from NY to LA in a luxury corporate jet, the official rates valued the trip at $1,347/person. (Less than the first-class fare of $2,200.)
The executive pays nothing.
Companies count the value of this personal trip as if it were income for the executive, and the executive just pays the income tax on that amount.
So, for an executive in a top tax bracket, the additional tax on that flight was $520.
But if there’s a memo in the corporate files stating that commercial air travel is too dangerous and company-provided transportation is necessary, then it’s only $260 in federal income taxes.
The $260 that the government takes is offset by the value of the tax deduction that the corporation claims on the jet.
The company gets a deduction that saves at least $3,500 in taxes.
That means the minimum subsidy the taxpayers provide to the executive for taking the jet is $3,240, the value of what the company saves in taxes offset by the $260 from the executive.
Diligent shareholders don’t know how much personal use of a corporate jet costs them, as those details aren’t noted in the documents that shareholders see."
Another good one:
"In 1998, Jerry Curnutt was the IRS partnership specialist. While examining a tax return that reported an investment of $10, he discovered a tax dodge.
The partnership’s $1,000 in capital earned almost ½ billion in profits.
The partner who had put up the $10 (Partner A) received 1% of the profits, while the other 99% went to the other partner (Partner B). Partner A was a business that had to pay taxes on its profits. Partner B was a tax-exempt entity.
Here’s how it worked:
The first trick was to report the profits, but assign them to Partner B, avoiding about $160 million of federal income taxes.
The second trick was characterizing this profit as capital due to Partner A, so that no tax would be paid.
Then, the capital was returned in the form of property that could be depreciated, and by writing off a portion of the ½ billion dollar asset each year, the Partner A could reduce its taxes on other profits it earned.
Thus, for $10, Partner A avoided paying $330 million of taxes over a few years.
Ultimately, Curnutt found a small number of partnerships that didn’t report the profit, resulting in billions in taxes that were never paid.
The IRS declined to pursue these entities, because auditing partnerships carried a political risk, such as turning up the names of important campaign contributors."
Yeah, the bit about people not being able to understand is an overly condescending way to phrase it, and is a cop-out. But we also see people at large completely missing the issue by trying to project their own experiences with The System onto the ultra wealthy.
Like, the number of times I’ve seen people astronomical income tax rates to deal with billionaires highlights both a misunderstanding of what income taxes actually tax, and how the economic elite generate their wealth.
No one is out there calling for a tax on unrealized capital gains, for instance. And while some people are lobbying for a wealth tax, the tax rates proposed are very small, which makes reactionaries quick to reject them.
It’s not that we plebs cannot understand, it’s that most of us just straight up do not understand, and choose to ignore that fact.
The average person makes under 100k even in reddits favorite high cost of living tech hubs where their six figures is pretty much makes them equivalent to the people on skidrow. It’s amusing how when they were struggling college students the bar for rich was millionaires. Those who’ve made it rich themselves the bar for rich person moved up to billionaires. So now they have to wax philosophic, “what exactly is ‘rich’?”. You got rich. There being richer people than you doesn’t change that.
Explain the same executive compensation minus tech and people will have their pitchforks out. But it’s tech so which has a different set of standards because it’s the internets darling.
The term is HENRY. High Earner, Not Rich Yet. People making $100-250k are surprised to find themselves still living paycheck to paycheck, struggling to save for retirement or afford things their parents did like take a vacation, improve their homes, or having children.
They’re not struggling to survive, but they aren’t living a life of luxury without going into debt.
You’re not looking at the cost of living. your actual income is usually irrelevant. you could be making $100-250k, it doesn’t matter, if the cost of living (and being able to actually get to your job) is 95% of that income.
For example, my buddy moved to the UK from BA where he was making $8000/mo and living paycheck to paycheck and going into debt. they didn’t tell him they would cut his salary down to $4500/mo until he actually got there. He had a panic attack, until his first set of bills arrived, and he realized he still had some 80% of his paycheck left for himself due to drastically lower cost of living.
Excuse me what? Someone earning that much money is only living paycheck to paycheck because their lifestyle is that expensive. And then it actually is their own fault for buying the 15$ Latte with a 30$ Avocado toast every morning, driving to work in their leased 100k $ car, while their wive drives her own 100k $ car.
That is plainly untrue
because the location where the job is, is expensive. and you can’t commute in that far into the job, without raising the rents in the suburbs and gentrifying them, too. where high paying jobs are, the market realizes they can raise the cost of living.
Yeah, it does happen but because people spend too much on shit they dont need
Edit: I got a 6 figure job. Lived in a cheap shitty basement, rode a bicycle, and took public transportation to work (which was subsidized by the gov). After a few years I quit and had enough to mostly retire
didn’t even talk about the net worth vs income issue. If someone makes $1/yr they’re still considered poor by the State, even if they have a few million $ in the bank.
Any one gonna click that and repost it here?
OP here has their head up their ass, because u/omegadirectory is 100% right.
[–]omegadirectory
857 points 2 hours ago* sigh, I hate to sound like a CEO apologist, but I also don’t want incorrect information being spread. The headline and the fact that the Fortune article is paywalled makes it easy for someone to skim the headline and the first paragraph and get steaming mad.
From a different article from the same day: https://www.businessinsider.com/reddit-ceo-steve-huffman-defends-193-million-compensation-package-2024-3
“A Securities and Exchange Commission filing said Huffman in 2023 got a salary of $341,346, which is relatively low for a CEO of a major public corporation. In February, this was raised to $550,000. He also got a $792,000 bonus last year based on Reddit’s user numbers, revenue, and a type of profitability known as adjusted EBITDA that excludes certain expenses.”
"The bulk of his compensation package is now in restricted stock units and stock options. A lot of this compensation is based on Huffman staying at Reddit through late 2028, and some is triggered by completing Reddit’s initial public offering, the SEC filing said.
Half of the stock options vest at $25.29, a relatively easy bar to reach. The other half vest only if Reddit shares reach $45, $60, and $90 in public-market trading over 10 years, the SEC filing says — that’s a higher bar and aligns the CEO’s interests with shareholders."
Huffman didn’t get $192 million in cash. $192 million wasn’t taken out of the revenues and paid to the CEO. He got $341346 + $792000 in cash for 2023, and the rest in stock and stock options. The stock and stock options are valued at just over $190 million, but that valuation is based on the projected stock prices when the company goes public. If the company doesn’t go public, he might never realize the value of those stock and stock options. If the company goes public, but the stock dips or never hits those $45+ thresholds, he can’t exercise those options and he doesn’t realize those gains.
You the real MVP.
So if we can short reddit to sub 45, Spez gets fucked.
Bruh that company isn’t worth 8 a share.
… Spez gets fucked.
Dude got paid $1.3M cash for one year of douchebaggery. If the IPO happens at $34, which seems likely, he’s still going to get several million dollars at least from that. That ship has sailed.
So… where is the complicated part?
Guy has a 192million dollar package, gets a million and change up front, almost 100mil when they go public and pump the stock up to 25 bucks. If they can inflate it hard enough to spike at ipo, he gets the rest of the 192mil. Once it crashes, the little guys are left holding the bag while Spez walks away with all of their money.
This is why they are trying to create an atmosphere of exclusion and by selling stock internally at tiers based on user engagement until they go public.
No one is too dumb to understand that. That’s why people are declining the option to buy pre-ipo. spez has been making shit decisions and preying off user/mod labor since the inception of the company. This is where they finally try to slit the golden goose’s throat… problem is, they forgot to fatten the goose first.
… almost 100mil when they go public and pump the stock up to 25 bucks.
That’s not accurate. If the stock price reaches $25.90, half of the options vest at some price. If they vest at an option price of $25.90, then Huffman has the option to purchase those shares at $25.90. If the price he’s able to sell those is also $25.90, there’s zero profit. Maybe they would vest at some lower price? I’m not sure.
The bulk of the money is on the far end. I’m sure the option price for all of them is set right now, and I suspect it’s likely at that $25.90 price. When (if) those later chunks vest at those higher stock prices, there’s a whole lot more differential between the stock price and the option price.
Just gonna leave this here. Teddit may be dead but…
If it wasn’t for Xi bux I wouldn’t have no bux at all.
