Bill Gates Says Wall St. Pay Is Too High

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Apr 27, 5:39PM EDT · Published Nov 12, 6:21AM EST

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bear 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

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.