For most people, passive income is a bit of extra pocket change that requires minimal effort to earn to supplement a main source of income. For Steve Ballmer, it’s $1 billion.
Shower thought: if everyone gives a % of their labour value to the government it's called taxes and is evil communism. If everyone gives a % of their labour value to an individual it's called capitalism and is glorious. How does that mental gymnastics work?
Capitalists are the ruling class that own the means of production through private property and profit from workers' labour, or otherwise have the vast wealth needed to have decisive influence on production.
Assuming $100k salary per employee, the money Balmer didn't need could have saved ten thousand jobs. That's a disgusting amount of wealth. No sane person hordes that much money.
It's not for doing nothing, it's for doing things he already did. He got the stock as part of his compensation plan at Microsoft.
And a dividend of $0.75 per share is 0.2% interest at the current share price, he could get more in a savings account and 20x that in a CD or something. The dividend isn't crazy high. He just had a shitload of their stock.
Executive compensation as a whole is a story, but Steve Ballmer is not doing anything particularly noteworthy.
stock ownership need to have an expiration date. Sure he did work to reclaim the gains of these shares, but at a certain point these stocks need to be relinquished and shared among the real contributors of the company so they could also get a taste of their work. You can't keep leeching off of people like this all the time, or whats the point of having kids and procreation overall ? Even 1 billion$ isn't much to make a globe changing endeavour like space travel, but its too much that if he chose to keep having coke injected directly into his body for the rest of his life he would still have money left. The mere existence of this person is just a nuisance, like many anonymous others
Doesn't make it right. And we should highlight each and everyone by name. Don't let them get away with hiding behind anonymization such as "shareholder", "owner", or "CEO".
Fine, but what do you do about it? Under the current system he’s equally entitled to receive $1 billion from his ownership as any other owner is receiving $1, he just got lucky getting his because his company just so happened to become one of the biggest in the world.