Comment by tossandthrow
7 months ago
Hard numbers for market cap is a difficult measure - Apples price earnings is 33 currently, which is high but not over high. Ie. Apple has revenue to back their market cap.
The issue with high salaries is that there is a latent assumption that these people provide the multiples in additional value. That they are so smarter than everyone else.
This is simply not true, and will lead to a competitive disadvantage.
Why aren’t they smarter than others?
Probabiliatically improbable - just like the world's most important cryptographic schemes rely on low probability of hash collision.
But feel free to prove me wrong - I am ammendable.
I guess there’s a lot of loaded language it’s not really worth debating. But I would never claim they’re ALL smarter than EVERYONE else.
But I would expect them to be smart and have relevant experience that everyone else doesn’t have, and I expect the companies offering these salaries aren’t doing it for fun but because they believe their IP or ability to generate IP is very hard to come by, and it’s better to monopolize that talent than let competitors do so. If they could hire 10 people equally as good for 1/10 the price then they would do so. But I’m sure there’s also a large dose of gambling too; even in sports highly anticipated freshman drafts can turn into duds.
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