Peter Thiel Quotes
A company does better the less it pays the CEO.
Thiel, Peter, and Blake Masters. Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future. Crown Business, 2014, p. 109.
The huge salaries paid to CEO’s in the early 21st century became a major political issue during the George W. Bush administration in the wake of the Corporate scandals like Enron and the failure of the Government to prevent these frauds. The tax deductibility of the huge salaries also attracted political attention at a time when Bush policies had created the largest deficits in the history of the world.
Corporate CEO pay had traditionally been 5-15 times the average wage for the company. But it had changed to where in banks and financial companies the CEO pay was often 100-1000 times the average salary. This became a major political issue after the 2008 Meltdown. During the Great Recession some CEOs who had led the company to huge losses and then had to take government money to bail them out and prevent bankruptcy, took multimillion dollar salaries and huge bonuses while average salaries had gone down. There was a move for government to regulate CEO salaries. Macke argued for the position that would finally be taken.
That has been the average perception well into the 21st century.
High level financial industry executives were earnings millions of dollars even if the company did poorly. In many cases annual bonuses were paid even after the firm lost money and in some cases after the firm had to be sold to stave off bankruptcy. The worst thing in 2009 and 2010 was when some of the banks paid million dollar and more bonuses while the company was getting bailout money from the taxpayers to prevent their bankruptcy.
Peter Andreas Thiel is a German-American billionaire entrepreneur and venture capitalist. A co-founder of PayPal, Palantir Technologies, and Founders Fund, he was the first outside investor in Facebook. He was ranked No. 4 on the Forbes Midas List of 2014, with a net worth of $2.2 billion, and No. 391 on the Forbes 400 in 2020, with a net worth of $2.1 billion. In 2016, Thiel confirmed that he had funded Hulk Hogan in the Bollea v. Gawker lawsuit because Gawker had previously outed him as gay. The lawsuit eventually bankrupted Gawker.
