Trump Says Overpaid CEOs Are A ‘Complete Joke’
Donald Trump, the billionaire CEO turned GOP presidential frontrunner, said that rising CEO pay is a “total and complete joke” during an interview with CBS’ Face The Nation on Sunday.
Although Trump claimed that such cronyism probably only exists in “less than 10 percent” of companies, he blamed exorbitant CEO salaries on corporate boards that are too close to top managers. “The CEO puts in all his friends” on the board, Trump said, “and they get whatever they want you know because their friends love sitting on the board.” Trump also said that it would be hard to solve this problem in a “free enterprise system,” although he still labeled it “a shame and its disgraceful.”
According to the AFL-CIO, many of the nation’s top CEOs make earn utterly gob-smacking amounts of money. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella earned more than $84 million in 2014. Walt Disney CEO Robert Iger earned over $46 million. The highest paid CEO in the nation, Discovery Communications’ David Zaslav, earned $156,077,912 in 2014. That’s enough money to put nearly 650 low-income students through a four-year degree at Harvard University. It’s also enough money to feed over 40,000 food-insecure men, women and children for a year.
Ironically, despite his criticism of overpaid CEOs, Trump himself lives a far more lavish lifestyle than his business acumen can justify. According to the Associated Press, Trump would be significantly wealthier if he had invested his money in an index fund that tracks the stock market rather than less-lucrative investments in real estate.
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This has been reposted from Think Progress.
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Image from iStock.
