Bill Gates is one of the richest men in the world and the founder of one of the most successful companies ever created. That means that the media hangs on every word he utters whether he has any background for his opinions or not.
Yesterday, Gates said Wall St. management pay is too high, and then said that it isn’t.
Speaking at an event on philanthropy Gates made the point that “The compensation problem is a very interesting problem. I do think compensation is often too high, but it’s a very tough problem to solve,” according to Reuters. Gates also said that a salary cap of $1 million established of certain executives in 1993 backfired and so could attempts to limit what financiers can be paid.
Gates probably does have the right to champion pay for performance. He always earned a modest salary at Microsoft. He great wealth came from the stock he owned in the company. The government pay czar is trying to duplicate that, in a way, by asking that Wall St. workers take more of their compensation in stock.
The problem is that Wall St. workers know that the “stock in place of cash” deal worked for Gates because he founded Microsoft. JP Morgan has been dead for many decades. The people who work at the company he founded are not likely to do as well as he did.
Douglas A. McIntyre
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