I'm sure she'll be especially susceptible to the charm of you spelling her name wrong.
Pete Hegseth Secretary of Defense
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Trumps picks are missing the same experience. None of them are experienced bureaucrats. Noonan can lament that but I think lack of that experience is a good thing. Government has become stagnant, bound up in red tape, and uses too many committees, panels, and “ stakeholders,” to have a smooth, efficient and agile method of operation. We need substantial changes . We need people in charge who don’t come from the problem.
In addition to lack of bureaucratic experience, Trump’s picks seem to be smart, decisive, independent, innovative, and unafraid of criticism. All good traits. Hegseth is not marinated in bureaucracy, but I don’t know if he is as smart, creative, or unafraid as some of the other picks.
There are plenty of people in our country that have experience successfully running large organizations that don't come from the govt bureaucracy.
This guy isn't one of them. Ridiculous pick
How would you assess the skills of Nancy Pelosi & Barack Obama as it relates to making themselves wealthier? At least Musk did so through private enterprise as opposed to using a career in politics…
So Tesla didn't get a bailout in 2010 of $465 million? Tesla didn't lobby for and get huge tax credits for buying a Tesla? Musk used the government just as much as any politician.
I understand why you avoided the actual question Marv…
Successfully running a large organization isn’t much of a qualification for this job. That person could be a plain vanilla manager without an innovative bone in their body. We have the best weapons and the best training. At the top we have ossified ideas and methods. Milley is the consummate example of the problems.
Hegseth has written four books about his view of America, its role, and how we accomplish its purpose. He is clearly passionate and patriotic in the flag-waving sense. He has a lot of ideas. He is no dummy. He’s guy I want there if we need to win a war. I’m not sure he’s the guy to get us ready. I was hoping Trump would pick Tulsi for the job. She’s pretty solid in all respects.
Of course it is. Elon Musk & Tesla received government aid to provide people with a product that, given its sales & performance, is in demand. What product or service did Pelosi, Obama, etc provide & who paid for it?
That’s way different. First of all, Tesla is the dominant EV player in the whole world. Compare that with the Obama era boondoggles with his solar pan al buddies. They took the money and we are holding the bag. China dominates the industry now.
The Tesla loan was part of a much larger Obama plan to pull U.S. out of the 2008 financial crisis with a massive green industry system of grants and loans. Tesla was along for that ride and paid back its loan way early. That whole green thing was mostly a failure as most of the green stuff is now Chinese. Except for musk and Tesla. Every EV gets a subsidy (until Biden changed the rules). Musk is the one who figured out how to multiply its effects.
There is nothing wrong with the public helping industry. Government has always subsidized transportation. Even the Romans and American colonists knew to do that.
Finally, The Tesla loan was not a bailout of past debt. It was a capital infusion to begin making an electric sedan.
The premise of the question is wrong, there is more than one way to make money off of government. Pelosi is known to have invested heavily in tech, buying Apple long ago was a great way for anyone to make big money (NVidia more recently). Does that mean she never scammed the government? I don't know. Do you have proof of her taking money from the government you can share? I'm under no delusion anyone in government, or business, is pure as wind-driven snow. I'm sure Trump has fleeced a person or two in business and as an elected official. We know that during his 4 years, foreign governments heavily used Trump properties. You don't think that was a coincidence do you? Is that better or worse than what you think Pelosi did?
I'm not saying Trump is worse, or Musk is worse. I am saying that anyone pretending they are different is lying to themselves. They WILL enrich themselves while doing what they do. Sadly we made greed a virtue and it has infected way too many.
Not all people who become obscenely wealthy are driven by greed. Henry ford intended to take automobiles from being only a toy of the wealthy to being a useful object for the common person and he became very wealthy doing that.
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Didn't you praise Musk for knowing how to cut at a large organization because of his successfully running that organization?
The notion that someone without experience running a large organization is actually a plus just evinces an ignorance of how very large organizations run, I think. They are different beasts altogether.
Yes.
I guess we need to know what it means to “Run an organization”. Jobs built Apple, he left Apple and apple went downhill. He came back and it became bigger and better than ever. I don’t think Jobs ran the organization. Instead he provided vision, creativity, and direction to where Apple should go. He hired people to run it. Musk is similar. Gwynne Shotwell runs Space X.
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Not all are, I completely agree. And many people who are poorer have greed as a vice. Many who are extremely wealthy are more driven by vanity than greed. Some might have both.
But up and down the line we have made money the scorekeeper. "you have to trust him, he's rich" has become a mantra. Particularly if they are saying something we like. Jack Welch carries a lot of blame for where we are. He made making money THE scorecard we judge people by. He made short-term profit the only consideration, which eventually killed GE. A lot of what people complain about, moving jobs overseas, came from Welch. Welch broke their supply chain to drive down costs. All of it sounded good, all of it was to make him personally wealthier by meeting ridiculous goals. Basically fire all your American employees, kill off your American supply chain, make a crap ton and get out. It became the model. Reginald Jones, Welch's predecessor, made $1 million his last year.
The pay received by Welch’s CEO predecessor at GE was equal to about 12 or 13 times the pay of GE’s newest management recruits.
Today, the wage gap between CEOs and workers has widened, according to one recent study, to 670-to-1.
Andy Jassy, successor to Jeff Bezos as CEO of Amazon.com Inc., was granted a pay package of $212 million in May that amounts to 6,474 times the company’s median pay.
David Olive: After a string of superb CEOs at GE before Jack Welch, General Electric Co. is all out of gold standards
Welch’s practice of managed earnings disguised the deteriorating conditions at GE’s biggest operations. GE is confronted with that reckoning now, David Olive writes.
Somewhere on my break was a thread about how capitalism goes astray, I submit the above as the prime example. Welch got rich by firing Americans and became a cult hero. As that article notes, GE was the 9th most profitable company before he started. It isn't as if it was struggling. We incentivized greed and short-term profits over all else. I don't disagree with the right on what the problem is, I am just not sure that cutting taxes on the modern Jack Welsh is the solution. Why not tie high end CEO taxes to American jobs lost or gained? A company lays off Americans, CEO taxes go up. Hires Americans, they go down?
One of my college roommates worked for Jobs at Next, one rung below Jobs. At least there, Jobs ran the company. My buddy has stories of Jobs having a temper and not being afraid to use it, Jobs came down to his office and berated him for a mistake, loudly and for a long time. When done, my buddy said, "my boss handles that, not me". Jobs left, went down the hall and started over. He not only had a vision, he demanded everyone align precisely to his vision. Maybe not far off from some athletic coaches.
I have never read or heard that. I don’t deny some think it. Bill Gates is exhibit “A”.
You must have read a book about Welch. This is the second time you cite him to support your point that is well beyond Welch’s corner of the picture.Not all are, I completely agree. And many people who are poorer have greed as a vice. Many who are extremely wealthy are more driven by vanity than greed. Some might have both.
But up and down the line we have made money the scorekeeper. "you have to trust him, he's rich" has become a mantra. Particularly if they are saying something we like. Jack Welch carries a lot of blame for where we are. He made making money THE scorecard we judge people by. He made short-term profit the only consideration, which eventually killed GE. A lot of what people complain about, moving jobs overseas, came from Welch. Welch broke their supply chain to drive down costs. All of it sounded good, all of it was to make him personally wealthier by meeting ridiculous goals. Basically fire all your American employees, kill off your American supply chain, make a crap ton and get out. It became the model. Reginald Jones, Welch's predecessor, made $1 million his last year.
The pay received by Welch’s CEO predecessor at GE was equal to about 12 or 13 times the pay of GE’s newest management recruits.Today, the wage gap between CEOs and workers has widened, according to one recent study, to 670-to-1.Andy Jassy, successor to Jeff Bezos as CEO of Amazon.com Inc., was granted a pay package of $212 million in May that amounts to 6,474 times the company’s median pay.David Olive: After a string of superb CEOs at GE before Jack Welch, General Electric Co. is all out of gold standards
Welch’s practice of managed earnings disguised the deteriorating conditions at GE’s biggest operations. GE is confronted with that reckoning now, David Olive writes.www.thestar.com
Somewhere on my break was a thread about how capitalism goes astray, I submit the above as the prime example. Welch got rich by firing Americans and became a cult hero. As that article notes, GE was the 9th most profitable company before he started. It isn't as if it was struggling. We incentivized greed and short-term profits over all else. I don't disagree with the right on what the problem is, I am just not sure that cutting taxes on the modern Jack Welsh is the solution. Why not tie high end CEO taxes to American jobs lost or gained? A company lays off Americans, CEO taxes go up. Hires Americans, they go down?
I reject the notion that capitalism goes astray because of bad actors. People go astray. We are not going to say democracy goes astray because crooked people are in government, are we?
I think the Vanity part comes after the wealth part, for most people anyway.
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Agree. I never thought of jobs as a manager. Your example doesn’t refute that point.
Capitalism has rough edges, as does democracy. Right, we make a big deal that we don't have a democracy because democracy can lead to tyranny of the majority? If we have safeguards against the rough edges of democracy, shouldn't we have safeguards against the rough edges of capitalism?
I’ve never understood why ceo pay is compared to ee pay. 200 mil on a co with 600 bil in revenue. So 0.333333 percent of revenue. Doesn’t seem like a high salary at all. To oversee that operation. Look what the Yankees pay players for a co that doesn’t even generate one billion.Not all are, I completely agree. And many people who are poorer have greed as a vice. Many who are extremely wealthy are more driven by vanity than greed. Some might have both.
But up and down the line we have made money the scorekeeper. "you have to trust him, he's rich" has become a mantra. Particularly if they are saying something we like. Jack Welch carries a lot of blame for where we are. He made making money THE scorecard we judge people by. He made short-term profit the only consideration, which eventually killed GE. A lot of what people complain about, moving jobs overseas, came from Welch. Welch broke their supply chain to drive down costs. All of it sounded good, all of it was to make him personally wealthier by meeting ridiculous goals. Basically fire all your American employees, kill off your American supply chain, make a crap ton and get out. It became the model. Reginald Jones, Welch's predecessor, made $1 million his last year.
The pay received by Welch’s CEO predecessor at GE was equal to about 12 or 13 times the pay of GE’s newest management recruits.Today, the wage gap between CEOs and workers has widened, according to one recent study, to 670-to-1.Andy Jassy, successor to Jeff Bezos as CEO of Amazon.com Inc., was granted a pay package of $212 million in May that amounts to 6,474 times the company’s median pay.David Olive: After a string of superb CEOs at GE before Jack Welch, General Electric Co. is all out of gold standards
Welch’s practice of managed earnings disguised the deteriorating conditions at GE’s biggest operations. GE is confronted with that reckoning now, David Olive writes.
Somewhere on my break was a thread about how capitalism goes astray, I submit the above as the prime example. Welch got rich by firing Americans and became a cult hero. As that article notes, GE was the 9th most profitable company before he started. It isn't as if it was struggling. We incentivized greed and short-term profits over all else. I don't disagree with the right on what the problem is, I am just not sure that cutting taxes on the modern Jack Welsh is the solution. Why not tie high end CEO taxes to American jobs lost or gained? A company lays off Americans, CEO taxes go up. Hires Americans, they go down?
You described very much a manager. He provided direction, he hired people to run it. That sounds more hands off to me. That wasn't Jobs. Jobs moved production to China because he wanted to be able to make changes, changes he himself wanted, and have them implemented immediately, 24x7. We don't hire engineers to sit around at 2AM to begin rebuilding things. Jobs was very hands on. Famously he yelled at the ad team because he didn't like the blue they used. he didn't allow people to run things, he ran things.
I don't know your point. The Yankee players are the product. People go see Judge play, and hopefully, win. The Yankees are selling Judge. The Dodgers are selling Ohtani. I don't buy from Amazon because of who their CEO is.
The teams with no payroll, think Reds, Pirates, A's, have almost no wins and no revenue outside of the national media contracts. The product they are selling is quite inferior.
Perhaps a bad analogy. It was just to demonstrate how much corporations pay despite having relatively meager revenue. I don’t think 200 mil for a ceo of a co generating 600 bil is out of line
How do we measure CEO success? Often it is by short-term profits. Well, that leads to the problem with Welch cannibalizing GE for short-term profits, eventually the body dies. So profits may not be a perfect indicator. Without that, there aren't stats like batting average, RBI, HR, SB, etc.
It is thought that between 2035-40, quantum computing will be here. About a week before the first company announces they are ready to sell quantum computers, make me CEO of that company. I will look like a genius CEO two weeks later. Of course, I will have played zero role in how we got there.
There are CEOs that are clearly effective, Jobs would be one. But Next failed miserably, short of Apple buying it to get Jobs back in. Without that, Next goes belly up. We know Trump has had several bankruptcies. It is sort of like stock brokers, how do we know the guy doing great today just isn't lucky? Someone out there right now has called heads/tails right 6 straight times. That doesn't make him a genius at calling a coin toss, it makes him the benefactor of the law of large numbers. Many of the CEOs getting that pay are just that, someone with no real skill getting the benefit of being on the right side of the law of large numbers.
If Next had collapsed, how would Jobs be viewed today? Probably not the same. Gates made some really good moves, mainly convincing IBM to let him sell DOS to other companies, but other than that I'm not sure he had an unrivaled business acumen. To an extent, he, Zuckerberg, Page/Brin, and Bezos benefitted from timing. If Gates were two years younger, someone else would have had that big IBM contract. Others were working on a search engine, others would have developed an online mass market. You might have a better idea than any of them, but with their companies already there it would be far harder for you to displace them than fill an empty void.
So how do we measure exactly how much a CEO contributes to a company. Yesterday Intel's CEO stepped down, he was considered a disaster. But there is little evidence to say exactly what he did wrong. The company was losing ground when he came in, he didn't reverse it. But in that field an immediate turnaround is impossible. At best case, and this won't happen, we won't catch Taiwan for 10 years. It isn't the next CEO's fault, it is just math. A human runner running a marathon can't just up and pass someone 200 yards ahead in 2 seconds.
We take it on faith that CEOs are what make American corporations successful. But why? Why not the engineers? Why not the workers?
Stephen Ambrose wrote about the WWII armies. The Russians were very top down, basically no decisions were allowed below Colonel and even Colonels were very limited. In the German army, it was the sergeant/lieutenant that made the German army, they carried out the action on the ground. In the American army, the corporal and privates had far more autonomy. He discussed how it was enlisted men who outfitted Shermans to get through the bocage in Normandy. I am not sure why Americans now only think in terms of the commanding officer and not the lower ranks. There are occasionally a true genius, but not nearly as many as it seems many believe. And as I suggest, it is awfully hard to spot them from the law of large numbers crowd. Somewhere that guy that won 6 straight coin tosses has won a 7th.
WRT the bolded, you're talking about organizations other than the military, right? In the military we still expect our junior ranks to make decisions at their level. The Commanding Officer will give his intent and the ship, battalion, squadron, strike group, make it happen. In our military the enlisted still make decisions which other countries only allow their officers make.
That’s a lot. Will definitely come back to it when I have more time. And to the extent I can. Those are positions so far removed from anything I know about that it’ll be pure conjecture regardless. I will say that these guys that come after the founders avoid the years of pain and sure make bank at these outfits.
Personally I like outfits that give ees skin in the game. Enterprise is privately held and does $40 bil a year. A dipshit with a b.a. can knock down $500k a year by 35 if he hustles. Why? Gets a piece of retail. That’s more money than most doctors. Those ees are incentivized and feel like they’re part of the pie
Is $56 billion in pay too much?
Elon Musk’s $56B Tesla pay package rejected again by Delaware judge
McCormick also ordered Tesla to pay the attorneys who brought the case $345 million, well short of the $6 billion they initially requested.
nypost.com
Not for a founder imoIs $56 billion in pay too much?
Elon Musk’s $56B Tesla pay package rejected again by Delaware judge
McCormick also ordered Tesla to pay the attorneys who brought the case $345 million, well short of the $6 billion they initially requested.
Lots of ayn Rand vibes in this thread
What are example of “rough edges” that are inherent in capitalism and not connected to bad actors? Or are you saying calitalism has rough edges because people have selfish motives?
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First of all, $465 bailout in the auto industry is peanuts compared to what was given to other US automakers.
Second, those 'huge tax credits' are for electric vehicles, not just Teslas.
All Musk did was take government policy and build a car company around it. Don't blame him for that.
If the system incentives behavior "we" as a society don't like or don't want, and another would not or would do it better, then I think it's fair to blame the system. Democracy and capitalism are not perfect systems and do incentivize and create situations that are not ideal (yes "ideal" is, for the most part, a subjective evaluation).
I think tech operations are much less relevant to how govt works than something like a bank. Even so, comparing Hegseth to Jobs and Musk isn't a very good comp is it? Be more like comparing Hegseth to a developer who used to work at one of those companies for a few years (with a history of partying a little too hard), then went on to become a tech reporter for the Today show--who you then want to install as the CEO of Apple.
But if you want to install someone like Jamie Dimon in any role in govt, I'd be all for it. He'd kill it. Why? Because he has experience working his way through, and changing the culture and cost structure of a few giant organizations. He has political experience, dealing with Congress, presidents, regulators, etc. Dimon is a serious man, with a serious work past, and an impressive intellect. Hegseth is a "star" of News-tainment with military experience.
The metrics for measuring whether a system is perfect depend on one’s subjective viewpoint. Those who view economic s and social order as a perpetual clash of classes will never see capitalism and democracy as perfect.
Those who see democracy or capitalism as perfect are willfully ignorant or not very bright.
They also, no doubt, would have thought feudalism perfect had they been raised in that system. Or Egyptian Pharoahs. Or Roman rule. Or Chinese govt of the 1100s. Etc.
I am not blaming him. He lobbied for that government policy. My point is that there are people here who detest government lobbyists who suddenly ignore that Musk has been one of the most successful at it. If one is going to hate government lobbyists as a matter of principle, shouldn't he be included? Why not?
When American corps made the decision to offshore production, was that a "clash of classes"? I don't know how else you could label it but I'm sure you will find a way. Which is the point. When money pools, when our system goes from a large middle class and smaller at the poles to a pyramid common in the banana republics and the like, we have to wonder if that is actually good for society and what causes it. You have long railed on lobbyists. We have people able to lobby our governments, other governments, other corporations, exceedingly effectively.
I have mentioned Welsh because he began the CEO exuberance, as I noted his predecessor made $1 million his final year. We were not doing wrong in America that needed Welsh to come along and entirely rewrite the playbook. I believe you mentioned Ford earlier, you know the story, Ford's competitors were angry that he was "overpaying" workers. He cut the work day from 9 to 8 hours and paid $5/day instead of $2.5.
I'd rather have a Henry Ford than a Welsh (pro-nazi leanings aside for Ford). We went through a long phase in America that a corporation could make everyone good money, it was replaced by it should only make good money for the CEO and investors.
I am just arguing for a return to an America that invites everyone to share in the nation's wealth, not just a Musk or Bezos. The great socialist Abraham Lincoln once said, "Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is superior to capital, and deserves much the higher consideration." For reasons unknown, we have moved that sort of thinking to "socialist" and decided only capital and management matter. That's what needs to be smoothed out. On its own, labor has far less power, and in the last 50 years, there have been substantial efforts by one party to ensure it stays that way. Jobs were moved overseas to make people like Welch rich. But for some reason, he and his brethren, aren't considered the evil elite.
Was moving all our jobs overseas good for America? If it was, why do you support tariffs? If it wasn't, what caused it to happen? The simple answer, the one you will try very hard not to give, is people in one class could make a whole lot more by doing it. Welsh sure did, I am sure even you won't try to argue otherwise. We rewarded people who moved American jobs with enormous bonuses and lower taxes. That'll teach them a lesson.
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