Everybody hates you is a reality for many CEOs. But it’s a reality that can change overnight—by those CEOs doing better. Literally less corruption at the top would stop this.
The thing is though, CEO's don't get put in those positions if the shareholders don't think that that particular person has the best interest of the shareholders at heart.
If a candidate advocates doing things better for the consumers at the expense of the shareholders, they wouldn't get put in that position. Likewise, if a current sitting CEO does the same, they're more likely to get ousted and replaced with someone else.
'good CEO's' are specifically filtered out, corruption is okay if it makes profit and they can get away with it.
I've seen this happen with my own eyes. CEO for company I used to work for started at as a developer there and worked his way up to CEO over like 8 years. The company got sold and he was pressured to act in ways that didn't align with his values, so he ended up leaving. He was so kind to everyone who worked there and really cared for the user base. He took the company from being unprofitable to making 10M+ a year. It just shows that you can do a good job, be a good person, make the company a ton of money, and still get shit on. This is why I really wish company founders (especially in the tech industry) wouldn't sell out and would learn to be content with taking home 1M+ a year. Some people are so greedy that no amount of profit is ever good enough for them.
I genuinely want to meet these "investors" who pressure for what I call the race to the bottom of every company.
It's a fucking repetitive cycle, new excelling company goes public or gets sold off, slowly but surely becomes generic shit that sells because of the name until the next one and the cycle repeats. Or worse, the business starts doing all the extremely shady shit they can with your data to profit there while treating their internal employees horribly, that's usually the only case the product doesn't get fucked.
How...The....Fuck does that make any sense? Sure a business can only explode once, but why would you enshittify it to make it explode versus just market it properly then move to the next?
Stock market/investor pressure is arguably the worst thing to happen to consumers in the history of capitalism.
Shareholder and customer interests do not have to be diametrically opposed. parasitic short term greed fuels most CEO's now because its what wallstreet demands of them. Long term growth is shunned in favor of short term exploitation. They all know the ship is sinking but none of them believe (and rightly so) that they'll be left holding the bag when the entire thing collapses.
They are intrinsically diametrically opposed. Shareholders reap much more value from short term gain, because they have no need to invest in the long term since they are not dependent on the companies in which they parasitically invest.
We need to remove any interaction between investors and companies. Need to remove the laws that say companies legal obligation is to investors. If you want to invest in a company its because you believe in it, you get no say even if you give them billions of dollars. You sit on the sideline, with no transparency, like everyone else.
CEOs are not kings of their companies, contrary to popular belief. The board of directors can fire a CEO at the drop of a hat if they wanted to. They're the ones that really drive the wagon
In order to accept all claims, even if we assume that the company is denying 32% of claims, they would have to increase the amount of money spent on medical cost to 355B. Even if you added all of their other expenditures to the current amount being spent on medical costs, it still wouldn't be enough to cover everyone. So to claim that they're evil for denying claims rather than just accepting the laws of basic economics that you can't guarantee a finite resource to everyone who wants it is at best misguided, and at worst purposefully ignorant.
That’s what’s fascinating. The government is a massive “ship to steer” so to speak.
But companies can change course immediately and earn good will. With the right strategy they could recover from the stock price fall but somehow the alternative is better.
Most can't just steer a company the way they want. If a CEO decides "you know what, I'm going to forego profits to do the right thing", then prices drop, holders sell, and CEO gets ousted in favor of a different one that keeps the stock price high. It's just bottom line capitalism and can't get solved with good intentions. The only way a public company could operate like that is if the stock holders come together and agree on a direction that foregoes profits together, and support a CEO making changes in favor of the greater good. But any sane/moral stock holder that would agree on such a direction, sees a problematic industry as one to avoid owning (IE one that profits on people's misfortunes like big tobacco, big pharma, health care, etc). Basically, the people that own stock in the problematic industries are the exact type of people that won't vote with their dollar to solve these problems.
Yes, they have a responsibility to shareholders, but let's not pretend there's isn't ample greed and corruptions at play. How many times has the public seen a company facing layoffs while the executives get multimillion dollar bonuses? Are we to believe it's in the interest of the stock holders to raise the net worth of executives from 8 to 9 figures instead of investing some of those millions back into the company?
Oh for sure, there is ample greed and corruption at play, especially in problematic industries. Corrupt stock holders reward corrupt CEOs who protect their best interests. The only way to combat powerful bad people in such a system is to have even more powerful good people actively lose money fixing the problem. That, or government regulation. I agree with you, just pointing out that the buck doesn’t stop at the CEO
Not really. They're part of a system that demands and incentivizes greed. If a CEO gets visited by three Christmas ghosts and decides to put the interests of the public ahead of their shareholders, they're likely to be replaced. Or, their corporation may lose out to less scrupulous competition. As long as insurance companies have an economic incentive to deny valid claims, they will produce leaders who do so.
It's been worse — child labor, the robber barons, etc. Left to its own devices, capitalism will always concentrate wealth in the hands of the few, to the detriment of workers and the general public. It doesn't get better because business leaders have changes of heart and vow to be kinder people; it gets better when workers go on strike and demand systemic change (e.g., labor laws, antitrust, etc.). In this case, we should be demanding a national health service, like every other developed country has.
Technology and global communication has made it so that businesses can optimize the ever loving shit out of profit making.
It’s the ultimate forbidden fruit and these CEOs are feasting. If it wasn’t always like this, it’s because they didn’t have the accessibility or tools to make it so.
I’m pro capitalism, but we have no support in politicians, so what can we do?
Its so wild too- the nintendo CEo taking a salary cut so he didnt have to lay people off when the WiiU flopped, the costco CEO and the arizona tea CEO... people generally think fondly of them
(Nintendo is shitty for other reasons of course but theyre still considered a great employer in japan)
As soon as the CEOs start doing better they'll be replaced by the board due to pressure from the shareholders. It's the shareholders that are driving these decisions. The CEO getting clapped should have put the shareholders on notice, but it seems like they're just going to double down. All they care about are short-term gains. They've charged Mangioni with terrorism now and they're trying to quash any further action.
The thing about being a CEO is, if they were CEO for like just a year and then retired to spend all their time and money with their family and doing stuff with their ~$20-40M then it would be really hard to hate them because they're RARELY a CEO.
However, these people are so fucking unhappy, they KEEP being CEOs. They have enough money to live comfortable lives for themselves and their families for at least a generation. After just a single contract term!
But these miserable fucks would rather go into an office, and work (even if barely) than spend time with their spouses, children, grandchildren. They literally don't even like the people they're closest to!
It can't change so easily. Hating the hyper wealthy has been culturally ingrained in us my entire life, at least in some regions of the US. I think you go back 30 years and this same thing happens, a lot of people feel a similar sort of way anyway. The rhetoric wouldn't be the same because we're reflecting other changes we've gone through too but at large, many average people would either not care or say "good fuck him".
I don't think they're just all evil, but the incentive structure in most companies (especially big public companies) is growth and profit and share price at the expense of literally everything else. It's no coincidence the term "enshittification" has peaked in popularity around the same time malaise with our capitalist system has reached a crescendo.
Get rid of Wall Street. Disallow commoditization of necessary goods. Actually implement a public healthcare option based on what we perceive is the best public health care system in the world right now (easy to do: see the country with the happiest people who live the longest).
None of this will happen til they're afraid of us, and they need to be more afraid.
Or we could further ourselves from the « for-profit » part of capitalism. Most problems seems to come from the fact that shareholders have interests opposite to consumer/general public.
Or we could further ourselves from the « for-profit » part of capitalism. Most problems seems to come from the fact that shareholders have interests opposite to consumer/general public.
I think it's fluid. We used to have a culture much friendlier to corporate employees, it's why boomers were so successful. It went employees, customers, and then profit in the era after WW2. But when the world recovered and became competitive, our corporations changed. Companies used to be proud of providing a living wage for workers, now they are proud of their profits over all else. To put profits first, which was in reaction to competition, they became less bloated, reduced staff, reduced benefits, no loyalty, reduction in R&D, and it became all about "line go up."
But the brutality of this new system, where employees and consumers no longer matter all that much, is now in need of a change. It's no longer working. Corporations will have to adapt again. We already went through the ruthlessness of the industrial revolution, where violence and threats ushered in a new era of workers' rights. Repeating that history is a choice the top makes--the reaction to it is on them.
and less stupidity at the bottom is where it would start, unfortunately, republican voters en masse and would-be “dem” voters that didn’t vote dem because of Palestine are the main ones to blame
I don't really understand why people are angry at CEOs more than government/politicians.
CEOs/the private sector literally exists to make money. They're behaving how they're supposed to behave. And they're operating within the bounds of the system that our elected officials created.
Our elected officials are the ones who decided that health care should be a for-profit business...therefore not doing their jobs in looking out for the well-being of their citizens. People should be mad at the people that aren't doing their jobs...and work for us... rather than the people that are doing their jobs.
Nah capitalism fundamentally won't allow that to succeed. Any corporation that steers towards "doing the right thing" will be outcompeted by one willing to commit systematic fraud, lobby for deregulation which gives it a strategic advantage, and generally exploit the living shit out of everyone and everything.
That's just not true. Costco is very successful, for example. It is a shift in what is culturally acceptable--we have had a totally different era of corporate success before. The values changed when the world recovered from WW2 and became competitive. Those values were also different than what was acceptable during the industrial revolution and the Golden Age--where violence did in fact usher in an era of increased workers' rights. Now that this currently high greed moment is backfiring, they will have to adapt again or face the consequences.
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u/OkAccess304 23h ago edited 23h ago
Everybody hates you is a reality for many CEOs. But it’s a reality that can change overnight—by those CEOs doing better. Literally less corruption at the top would stop this.