2w ago

Which CEOs are actually worth keeping around?

426 comments

Video game industry will collapse in on itself when Gabe Newell dies, and enshittification creeps into Steam.
- I shall seize one of his yachts (probably metaphorically) and sail under the Jolly Roger when enshittification comes for Steam. Until then, it’s a pretty solid solution for buying PC games.
  Steam Deck is also amazing, in that it’s as simple as a Switch to get playing but open enough through desktop mode to do so much more. As your customer, thanks for not treating me like a paste eating delinquent.
  
  What concerns me about the future of sailing is the sea monster known as denuvo, as there haven't been a way to reliably hunt it down
- Something I've been worried about for some time. I mean, I hope his death isn't soon, but we all know whoever steps in is most likely to royally fuck it up.
  
  He just needs to make it an employee owned company. I believe it would make it a stable institution.
  
  I actually have hope for the company after he is gone. All they have to do is keep steam going and they win. They just print money. There is no reason to go evil and sell the company and go public. They just win.
- Already moved on from Steam. Had 750 games there. Deleted the client and started GOG collection. No Galaxy client for me. No more cancer social media, achievements, friends.. just Offline installers and the satisfaction that I actually own these games now.
- Because he maintains a near monopoly.
  
  He doesn't tho. He just offers such a good service to people that they don't want to use anything else. That's not a monopoly.
  
  and he maintains a near monopoly because Steam is just a great platform for gamers, as Gabe has said:
  Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem.
  and he's right! i almost never pirate video games because of their price, i can wait for a sale, there's a billion other games i can play in the meantime
  when shit like Epic takes years to implement a shopping basket, and still have yet to recolour their payment page so it stops flashbanging gamers across the world, Steam doesn't even need to try very hard to be the best. The biggest changes on Steam in the recent years are what - updating the UI aged ago? adding a points system so people can get silly profile decorations as an additional reward for buying a video game? Steam has created a platform so good all they need to do is sit back relax, and think of what other sprinkles colour to add to the ~~cake~~ pie?
  Steam has competitors, but the difference is Steam is for gamers, and most of their competitors is for money
  god help us all if that ever were to change, the second Steam enshittifies the internet will implode
  
  What monopoly ?
- Steam is already enshitified. Every other marketplace just sucks that much.
  
  No it isn't. I have yet to pay a single cent or subscription in more than a decade.
  
  Nows a good time to articulate a defense. Because as far as their impact on gaming as a distributor, theyve enabled more than any other company by far
  
  Any examples? AFAIK they improved a lot, especially in Linux space which I am very grateful for. I wouldn't be using Linux if it wasn't for steam. Although there are still a lot of things to complain about but if it wasn't better before then it isn't enshiftification by definition.
  
  I can see how you can say that about the Steam's UI in some spots, but not Steam as a whole. They have a great business model, as far as video games are concerned.
  They have some of the highest paid employees, and they keep prices low.

Think the CEO of Costco did a similar move with the hot dogs
- Close. The founder told the CEO if he raised the price on the hotdog "I will fucking kill you".
  So, who really gets the credit here is up to you.
  The person who threatened to kill the CEO if the CEO fucked his customers, or the CEO who didn't fuck his customers out of self-preservation?
  
  They also bought 2 hotdog factories to minimize the loss.
  Costco does pay decent as well.
  Could they do better? Yes, but they are pretty decent for employees and consumers.
  
  What if the killer was the Costco founder? He told the United Healthcare CEO the same thing and then followed through.
  
  So what your saying is, Costco’s founder and the shooter have a similar energy?
- Costco also puts a maximum percent profit on items.
  
  Really? That's awesome.
  
  Apparently they make more money from memberships than from sales margins, which are capped.
- Also. I believe, he also said , if the workers think they need a union, we’ve failed as managers.
  So. Yeah
  
  I mean, it’s an understandable viewpoint.
  It’s when union busting tactics are being brought in that things are problematic.
  
  I wish more companies had this mindset. If you treat your employees well and listen to their needs, they won't need to unionize. When they do unionize, it means they don't feel that they have been treated well and listened to.
  It seems that the end result of this philosophy would be to treat your employees well!
  
  To be fair, he's not really wrong, meaning that they've failed to take good enough care of their people, and my understanding is he didn't stand in the way of one forming...
- “I came to [Sinegal] once and I said, ‘Jim, we can’t sell this hot dog for a buck fifty. We are losing our rear ends,’” Jelinek recalled in a 2018 interview with 425 Business. “And he said, ‘If you raise the effing hot dog, I will kill you. Figure it out.’”
  https://thehill.com/homenews/4696314-costcos-new-cfo-makes-announcement-about-1-50-hot-dog-combo/#%3A%7E%3Atext=We+are+losing+our+rear+ends%2C%27%E2%80%9D+Jelinek%2Ceffing+hot+dog%2C+I+will+kill+you.
  
  Out of curiosity, how is it legal for Sinegal to say that to Jelinek? Or it isn't but no one cares to press charges?

CEO of Ben &Jerry's. They are not just posting the black square on their insta and then moving on, like half their posts are about fighting inequity, encouraging people to vote for actual human rights, openly pro abortion, pro immigrant rights, pro black rights, pro women's right, about fighting climate change etc. they are walking the walk, conservative dollars be damned
- Also AFAIK they are one of the few companies that have been removed from the BDS list after improving behavior and leaving illegal Palestinian settlements. Recently they sued their parent company for silencing their statements on Palestinian rights.
  I don’t love ever setting any people or corporations on a pedestal. Nevertheless this is reassuring behavior to see amidst all the Starbucks, AirBnB and Re/Maxes of the world.
- Adding my vote of confidence to them
- It's a shame they don't fully move to vegan ice cream
  Edit: When the very base ingredient of their ice cream is based on exploitation and torture, how much are their initiatives really worth? It's virtue signalling at its best
  Plus I'm yet so see someone giving a valid reason as to why they shouldn't. Just tell me you don't care and I'll move along
  
  Why should they? I have no problem with people being vegan and I have no problem with vegan food being provided as an option but I don't think vegans have the right to dictate to everyone else how they live their lives.
  
  That would be an absolute disaster.

GabeN has been pretty cool.
- Gabe has 6 yachts worth about $1 billion dollars. Not very cool at all, imho.
  
  He didn't kill anyone by denying them insurance or anything like that tho. Just took a commission on every game sold on Steam, a platform nobody's forced to use.
  
  Being a bit greedy =/= Killing millions of people through death panels
  Huge difference
  
  Im a huge steam fan.
  I am not a fan of someone who can own multiple yachts.
  Sorry GabeN.

This CEO, Gabe Newell, and (if he was still alive) the founder of Little Caesars, who, if I recall correctly, secretly paid for Rosa Parks apartment until her death.
- The founder of Little Caesars was a typical magnate developer who bought up much of downtown Detroit and let it rot until he received tax incentives to build, and kicked out many low income residents from apartments he let sit until they got city money. His family continues this tradition. The Rosa Parks thing is the only good thing I've ever heard of that man and his family do.
- Add Steve Wozniak to the list of the ones to be protected. The Woz has done more to pull people up and we should all aspire to that level if we ever have the means.
  
  Woz isn't a CEO and was stabbed in the back so many times he makes the Ten of Swords look like a sign for future friendships
- Gabe Newell owns fleets of yachts and private jets. The man is using your sweet gaming money to burn the planet.
  
  Yeah but daddy gaben let's me play my games 😩 so it's okay
  
  Yeah we need a source.
  Also, as far as CEO's go, speaking from an outside perspective obviously, the man is wonderful. Valve makes solid business decisions in favor of long term growth instead of short term profits. They do this buy making sure that their platform is easy, safe, reliable, and not abusive for their consumers. They institute their own consumer protections into the platform that make them less money, just to make sure they remain a place we WANT to shop, when everyone else tries to make themselves the only place to shop, and then fucking over their consumers at every opportunity. Valve is a fucking case study on how companies should be ran, and a perfect display of how modern american capitalism is ruining everything, by being the antithesis of it.
  
  maybe he's just buying up all the yachts and private jets so no one else can have them.
  
  Sources or STFU.
- aww
- Nah people need to stop jerking off Gabe and valve I general.
  They started predatory lootboxes, ridiculously expensive cosmetics, early access, owning a licence instead of the actual game, had to be sued just to get refund policy and the vast vast majority of his wealth has come from just skimming a bit off from people who actually make games he distributes.
  If you look at valve without the "omg steams sale XXXDDD"" mentality, then they are no better than ea or Activision.
  
  Do you understand how much work goes into distributing terabytes of content around the world?
  Valve give you AAA games. For free. No material restrictions on game-play or competitive advantage. They pay for the server hosting, anti-cheat and matchmaking.
  The provide a storefront that anyone can sell their games on. And they don't contract you into exclusivity periods like others do. Do you think it's coincidence that they have, by far, the largest games store in the world?
  They have supported games, for free, for over 10 years. You could have 10 years of world-class online gaming (CS:GO/2 or DOTA2) and have not spent a single penny, with no hit to your ability to play and win.
  Sure, they're not perfect, they are at their core a profit-driven company and they can do things that are not in the consumers best interest.
  But to compare them to shitbags like EA and Activision/Blizzard is an incredible thing to do. And removes any weight from your argument.
  
  Truth.
  Valve been private company allows them to avoid some shortsighted decisions of public corps, but they're no saints.
  We need more stores, with an interstore protocol allowing you to move your licenses. EU get on that please
  
  He also normalized hosting kid's content and adult/gambling content on the same platform. Anyone who tried to open up a game store that also sold adult material would get crucified nowadays.
  The reason Steam is praised so much is because unlike EA and Activision, regardless of what they try to push that they shouldn't, they do put in the effort of going back and looking at issues from gamer's eyes. Those cosmetics? They came about at a time when P2W was much more of a concern, and paying for something merely visual was considered much more acceptable. Early access? It came about from trying to open up development to more indies instead of just the big devs and publishers. Licensing instead of owning? The alternative were much more costly physical copies that also degraded with time and which you had to maintain a backup of yourself. If your local game store didn't have it, you were screwed, and there could be no discounts. Porn on the platform? Don't care, not a child and I'm responsible.
  Even then, I still damn Valve on both normalizing licenses on a subscription service that were it not for its market dominance could easily be teetering right now along with most people's game library's, and for not bothering to make an adult/gambling only version of a game store. GOG needs a competitor (remember Devotion and now Nine Sols), and it has none. It is possible to make money and be a digital distribution service without being a subscription service. There should be far more distance between adult and predatory content and normal gaming content, not all parents are responsible and it more easily creates communities predators can target from overlapping interests.

CEOs should just be elected by the employees
- That's a feature of Market Socialism, but we can't call it that because sOcIalIsM sCaRy, so let's go with Democracy in the Workplace.
  
  Socialism is of course democratic. When people say "socialism is bad" what they mean is Socialism is good, and they're thinking about Communism, which is actually also good but has never really been implemented properly.
  
  I mean, that's literally the conclusion that Richard Wolff came to. Call it whatever, just as long as we do it.
- Pirates had some of the purest forms of democracy. Their captains were democratically elected in many cases as well. Not sure why they came to mind when you said this... But if your going to rip people off, and democratically pick your leader, pirates formed your company right
  
  Seems like the pirate environment is especially suited to this type of democracy. Pirate ships operate outside the protections afforded by law, so the only thing really preventing pirate captains from being ousted (or murdered) is the crew's support.
  I guess a CEO would need to maintain shareholder support, but shareholders are generally fairly disconnected from the company's day to day operations. Most individuals own shares through mutual funds or ETFs, which means they don't actually have share ownership themselves and can't vote. All you have is the fund owing you a fiduciary duty to vote in your best interests, which generally translates to whatever makes the most money. So the CEO just needs to keep a few large institutions happy, and possibly some large wealthy individual shareholders that he knows from the rotary club (where the heads of aforementioned institutions are also members)
  In other words, the way the financial system is set up systematically deprives the less wealthy from their right to have a say in the operation of the companies they nominally own a part of.
- At the start of the Russian Revolution, the Soviets tried that. Even they quickly discovered that pure democracy didn't work well when choosing "the boss." They even went so far as to remove ranks from the military. Which failed even faster.
  Turns out, "the boss" often can't afford to be popular or buddies with everyone when making decisions.
  
  Che Guevara wrote about in his book Critical Notes on Political Economy about how workers who are given full autonomy in their enterprises actually can become antagonistic towards society because they benefit solely from their own enterprise succeeding at the expense of all others, and thus they acquire similar motivations to the capitalist class, i.e. they want deregulations, dismantling of the public sector, more power to their individual enterprise, etc.
  The solution is not to abandon workplace democracy but to balance it out also with public democracy. You have enterprises with a board that is both a mixture of direct appointments from the workers at that company with their direct input, as well as appointments by the public sector / central government. The public appointments are necessary to make sure the company is keeping inline with the will of everybody and not merely the people at that specific enterprise, because the actions of that enterprise can and does affect the rest of society.
  Workplaces need to be democratic, but also not autonomous from the democratic will of the rest of society.
- Yeah... no.
  Reality is sometimes the boss has to be bossy. Quadrupling salaries and cutting 4 days a week from the schedule sounds great for employees until the business fails.
  What should be implemented is a maximum ratio of executive/worker pay (including contractors so they don't just outsource cheap labor to cheat the system) based on 5-year averages.
  Without the 5-year rule, and new CEO can come in, give everyone massive raises, and burn the company down for a quick buck.
  
  The boss can still be bossy if elected. Your 5 year rule is silly and does not address the overlying problem, which is that the CEO works for the shareholders and they only care about making record quarterly profit gains at any cost.
  
  The boss does sometimes have to be bossy. If the workers have a stake in the company that actually matters, then they also actually care about the outcome that the company faces.
  You're not going to vote to drive something into the ground if you think it will provide you with more value not dismantled and in your pocket.
  Workers aren't idiots any more than CEOs are. It's why worker owned co-ops that elect their management do sometimes vote to reduce their own wages. They have a fair stake and want what's best for the business because it's best for them.
- You could in fact create a company that operates like that if you wanted. The problem is that you can't force every company to organize according to your preferences.
  
  You could if you worked together... And your preferences were the majority's preferences
  
  Except if it's capitalism right, because this bullshit is happening now
  
  If Congress writes the law then it can be so.

Couple of British examples of what should be the standard for modern business:
Julian Richer, founder of Richer Sounds (hifi store in the UK), seems like one of the better capitalists around. He signed over majority control of the company to an employee trust when he turned 60, donates 15% of their profit to charity, runs a nonprofit dedicated to exposing corporate tax avoidance, campaigns against zero hours contracts, and devotes company resources to promoting unsigned bands: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Richer
James Timpson recently stepped down as CEO of Timpson, another UK retailer that specialises in things like key cutting, shoe repairs, passport photos etc. He made it company policy to hire people who had been to prison and help them get back on their feet, and his campaign for prison reform saw him step down from the company to become Minister for Prisons in the current government. The company has a "Director of Happiness" who is paid to keep the front line staff happy, resulting in policies like getting the day off work on your kid's first day of school, compassionate leave for the death of a pet, etc. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timpson_(retailer)
- Timpsons apparently has really interesting business models.
  A friend of mine has worked on a few of their conferences, and apparently it's both fascinating and they come across as a genuinely wholesome business.
  It's a franchise, but the franchisee (ie the shop) has complete control over what they sell and what services they provide (I dunno if there are any guard rails). So if they want to offer dry cleaning, they can. If they want to offer phone repairs, they can. If they want to only partially offer something, then they can rely on the Timpsons service network to provide the actual service (so dry cleaning without owning dry cleaning equipment).
  https://www.timpson.co.uk/about-timpson
  The management teams delegate authority but retain responsibility and we have only 2 rules:
  Look the part
  Put the money in the till
  And apparently they look after their staff really well. Actually good/useful perks & benefits. In addition to the compassionate leave you've mentioned, I'm sure my friend said something about timpsons owning some property that they allow their staff to book for free (like free accomodation for holidays). Or maybe they do block bookings of stuff, or something. I wasn't hugely paying attention tbh.
  
  franchisee*
- Plus their stores smell even better than petrol.

Is the CEO of costco still a decent guy?
- The hot dogs are still $1.50
  
  nuff said
  
  And the roast chickens are still the cheapest in town.
- 'Frade not. They are currently executing union busting measures against their workers.
  
  Did they actually go through with it? I remember them attempting it, but then immediately backing down and issuing a very reasonable response letter basically saying they were clearly in the wrong and allowed the union to form. I could totally be unaware of any more recent developments though.
- Costco recently got a new CEO. The company had been pushing scummy tactics ever since.
  
  That's disappointing.

Newman's Own salad dressing. Privately owned and all profits go to charity.
- Privately owned doesn't mean anything. SpaceX, Twitter (I'm not calling it that), and Tyson are all privately owned.
  
  Privately owned at least means they aren't slaves to their quarterly reports. Every time a company goes public, they're subject to the delusion of infinite growth in a finite system.
  
  In fairness SpaceX isn't run by Musk, which is why it's actually doing constructive things and not getting into culture war arguments every 15 minutes.
- Same with their frozen pizzas? I had never bought one before, then saw they were on sale the other day and figured I'd try them. Think it was 4.99 a piece. (Bogo 9.99) The pepperoni and ricotta one wasnt bad. The sourdough wasn't very decipherable, but better than many cheaper pizzas. The 5 cheese I can't speak for... As I overcooked it. The timer went off and I checked it, said to myself the cheese could melt a bit more and closed the oven. Saw the bottle of strawberry wine I was making didn't look like it was bleeding air properly next to the sink and decided I should slowly turn the cap to drain the pressure and let the fermentation continue. (Have gallons of strawberries I froze left over still from spring that I grew). Turned the lid a bit and it of course exploded so much worse than I expected. Ceiling, floor, cabinets and everything within 10 feet got hit. I went to the bathroom and took my shirt off washed myself, started cleaning up the mess and cleaning the ceiling, cabinets and finally the floor when I remembered, oh shit the pizza.... Yeah. The cheese was melted by then.. just a bit darker than intended
- Seconding this, Paul Newman was probably the best person to ever come out of the state of Ohio.
  He co-founded Newman's Own, a food company which donates all post-tax profits and royalties to charity. As of May 2021, these donations totaled over US$570 million. Newman continued to found charitable organizations such as the SeriousFun Children's Network in 1988 and the Safe Water Network in 2006.
  (Pasted from his Wikipedia page)
- And, sadly, no longer available in Canada for some reason :-(

Craig Jelinek the (CEO of costco until recently) was always considered a good guy for putting his employees first and concentrating on keeping a high bar for product quality.
- Until recently? Did something happen recently to change this? (Genuine question, I've only heard good things about the Costco ceo)
  
  Craig Jelinek, the CEO of costco until reecently, was considered
  Fixed their sentence with commas for clarity
  
  For actual clarity, Craig Jelinek stepped down in 2023. Ron Vachris is the current CEO. Not sure if there's been any negative policy change since then though.

Sam Reich of Dropout TV
- He's been here the whole time!
  
  "Teachers and nurses should be paid less, stock a vending machine with Advil and it could to the same job" - Sam Reich
- Is he even technically rich-rich? Or is he just my-parents-have-money rich?
  
  It's to my understanding that Dropout is doing pretty damn well, so I imagine he's pretty rich from that. Not billionaire rich, but likely a millionaire.

Any CEO that champions OpenSource software is good enough to me
- Exclusively open source? Otherwise, you'll spare Zuckerberg too. Facebook has given us a bunch of really cool open source projects.
  
  Facebook has given us a bunch of really cool open source projects.
  did you mean honeypots?
  
  I hate Facebook/meta but Zstandard is fucking nice.
  
  Of course Exclusive & strongly-CopyLeft
- ... and actually gets their company to support it. My previous employer would only use FOSS when possible (good). But they refused to financially contribute to those projects (BOO!).

All of them
at minimum wage
- Make their pay and benefits the same as the lowest paying position in the entire company.
  Simple and effective
  
  I always forget that in America minimum wage is just a suggestion

Any CEO that is willing to part with 50% or more of their wealth before they die and not to their family or close friends, should be good. No idea about names
- Any CEO that is willing to part with 50% or more of their wealth before they die and not to their family or close friends, should be good.
  And that includes their ~~totally above board charitable organization~~ money laundering and tax shelter organization masquerading as charity.

Bill Penzey would be safe in my book. Penzey's spices are a fantastic product, but he's an activist who very vocally supports equality, respect, and human dignity.
Shortly after the election I received a blanket from them with a very kind note. Apparently they had a promotion where you could submit the name and address of someone who is struggling and could use a hug. I have no idea who nominated me, but I'm so grateful. Penzey's didn't change any money for this, which is crazy to me.
- I just went to the website and was my attention was first on the link "About Republicans". An essay on the current fall of the Republican party and why they don't believe in them anymore. I think they deserve some of my money.
  
  You will be well rewarded with a quality product, too! It's so good, even my MAGA mother in law is on their mailing list. If you enjoy the essay About Republicans, you'll likely also love their emails. They have great sales, too. The weekend before the election they offered half off almost everything in their stores if you mentioned the promotion, and I got a free coffee mug, sticker, and sample product. They offered me two mugs because my partner came with me, but I didn't want to be greedy.
  
  An essay on the current fall of the Republican party
  This has been going on since at least the 2000s and possibly earlier, that's the point at which I started paying attention to US politics. It was even noted in the Newsroom which I think is circa 2012
- I loved going into the Penzey's near me. Just about every spice you could ever need, and my store had an entire section dedicated to different types of cinnamon from all around the world. The people that worked there were all super nice and helpful too, it was always a joy going in there. Unfortunately that location didn't survive COVID 😢
- Their emails are amazing. And the spices are very very good. I need to get some more of their vanilla. It was on sale, I think it might still be for today.
  Also there's sometimes pictures of pets in the emails.

The ones without public shareholders.
The ones that are vocal about issues and on the right side of history.
- We actually don't know what the "right side of history" is because that'll be decided by historians that aren't born yet.
  
  That's why I failed to enumerate it

I know he's not American, but Hidetaka Miyazaki of FromSofware
- Great games but sadly working conditions at fromsoftware were not the greatest. Sure this is another country we're work life balance is different then in Central Europe but the pay was not good given how much work is was and how successful the studio got. But to give credit where it is due, AFAIK there have been significant wage increases.
  
  than*
- Aren't they literally in the process of cashing out and selling to Sony?
  
  FromSoft's parent company is in considerations, iirc.

My company's owner/CEO can stay, gives us all sizeable profit share bonuses. During covid people didn't get layed off, even though there was no work. Sure hours were reduced, but work was found around the shop to keep people busy as much as possible.
In other words, small business owners that care about employee and their clients.
- Who stay small because they don't squeeze their employees and their clients to grow. They care about risks when opening a new location, even if those risks are primarily to the people they'd hire.
  What's it called when something grows out of control without regard to the welfare of their peers or the sustainability of the system?
- In other words, small business owners that care about employee and their clients.
  YMMV
  sure some do
  
  I agree, hence specifying the ones who care.
  Way too many do not care and wonder why no one is "loyal".

Well I know for sure ain't nobody mentioning the Nestle CEO, Laurent Freixe, on here 🤣

Maybe all CEOs get a yearly review. If they are good, they continue working. If something doesn't add up, they get to choose to quit or they get executed right on the spot by placing their head between two large metal plates. The top plate is then dropped from 3 stories high.
- This sounds like the start of how liberal govt. was invented.
  We'll end up with elected reps, laws, courts etc.
  Which will soon be corrupted by the private sector
  We'll need to invent some kind of open source decentralized communications platform to discuss the problem.
  
  to be fair, corruption will always exist, but without the strongest forces of corruption present (yes the rich surprisingly) it will be a lot more manageable
- Why wait a year? Make it bi annual
  
  I don't particularly mind if they're bi or not lol.

Bill Long (now retired), who helped to transition WinCo into an employee owned business.

can't decide yay or nay for Mozilla but
Valve and CloudFlare.
- Cloudflare provides valuable services this day on age but they’re building into a dangerous monolith of internet structure. Not sure how comfortable I am with that
  
  CloudFlare's dns seems like a better choice than Google's (from a mullvad dns user)
- Gabe has like 7 yachts doesn't he?
  
  He's filthy rich and makes some of his money with gambling addiction. But his company invests million into Linux and I really enjoy Valve's products. There are thousands of worse CEOs and companies.
  
  Gaben is number 107 on the Forbes top 400 billionaires list.
  Dude is fucking stacked
- Definitely valve. Say what you will about the man, or don't, I'm not your manager, but he has kept the same formula to steam since it was created. While other empires crumble and fall to enshittification, valve simply is.
  We need Gabe to stick around as long as possible. If he wants to buy yachts and gamble with the money he has, let him. He didn't get to where he is by chasing every last dime and dollar, he got there gradually by running the company in such a way that it served the user base. As long as Valve's Software continues to focus on the user, we should leave this one alone.

I would rather focus on billionaire and millionaire than CEO since both are not automatically interchangeable.... .
You can be a CEO In a small business without being a millionaire of the same category as the one of United HealthCare
- This thread is cursed. First, "lets make a list of CEOs who are incredibly cool aktuly". Then "you know who are better than the mega-rich? The delusional wanna-bes who nickel and dime everyone they do business with in the vain hope of hitting the big time".
  Worst human being I ever worked for was a guy who'd franchised out a college exam prep business and expected me to be on call 24/7 for $250/week. Guy was charging $2500/student for a six week course and my class had ten of them. Fuck small business owners.
  
  So your one experience represent all small business owners... Just wow
  Thankfully you don't paint with a broad brush 🙄

Spains Mercadonas CEO. They follow a very respected model where the consumer is the first priority, then the employees. Works great and they still make a shitton of money. Things like closing sundays because employees should have a life, etc. Employee rotation is super low.
- Spains Mercadonas CEO. They follow a very respected model where the consumer is the first priority, then the employees. Works great and they still make a shitton of money. Things like closing sundays because employees should have a life, etc. Employee rotation is super low.
  Is this for real? you mean Juan Roig, the guy who forced his employees to work during last DANA (aka 2024 floods in Spain, in which more than 200 spanish people died under it's effects, here is some local news with a capture of one of their delivery vans in which their logo has been deliberately deleted).
  Who also had to let their workers stay at home because of popular pressure after they tryed to once again force them to work on subsequent climate alerts, who also tryed to force them to take vacation days if they didn't show up to work...
  Who is also well know in the country besides their practices to flood mass media with covert advertising for pressuring their employees beyond the limits of legality?
  Who also publicly threatened some guys who happened to come cross him on one of his supermarkets who recriminated his practices?
  BTW in Spain all shops stay closed on Sundays except on a few rare occasion every year on a few sectors, but reading what you just wrote maybe some of them still work on Sundays...
  
  I have read the links. It seems that it's not as nice as they paint it. However, it seems normal that in an organization that size, things will not be perfect, or even near, but it does seem that they are better than most. They are the chain that pays their employees the highest salaries, for example. If you have 105.000 employees, it's a given that some will have problems at some point. About the DANA thing: I'm going to guess that store managers had much more to do than the company. It seems that on the whole they are better than most other chains in that respect. Some of the links you post go against your arguments, and some are from media which is not local, as you mention, but based in Argentina, and which has had court rulings against them for publishing fake news. BTW, stores in many regions in Spain open several Sundays during the year, and in Madrid, all Sundays, except Mercadona.

It’s $1.29 now printed on the can here
- Not much of a price increase over nearly two decades.
- I'm sorry for your loss. I got the green tea at a gas station the other day for .99 cents in Nashville. So it must be regional
- I haven't seen that.
  I only see that it's 22oz and not 24oz now.

What is "the People's Cookout"
- I'm gonna guess it's the sort of situation where you bring your own torch and pitchfork.

The Patagonia CEO seems like a genuinely good dude
- Nope.
  You’ve just been fooled by good PR.
  
  Care to elaborate?
- Adam Conover makes some good points on this topic.

As long as keeping them around doesn't mean not taxing the shit out of their extant assets, I think a few are probably worth being spared.

Been decades since I saw one of those cost a dollar
- They’ve been a dollar everywhere I see them sold. If you see someone selling them for more you can contact the manufacturer and they may stop selling to them. They’ve done it before.
- The price is on the can though
- Been buying them at my local market for 89¢ each on sale for the past few months. I have seen them for like $1.25 or so at some places though, even though the can says 99¢

Where are the CEO's that lead with fair income distribution and implement company policies that follow the Danish, Norwegian, Swedish or Finnish labor laws and lifestyles?
Crickets...

Only the ones who relinquish all of their wealth and offer to become a rank and file worker.
- Ah yes, so that they will be replaced with someone much worse. Great plan.

Shane Te Pou maybe ? (from mega.nz)

Mike "My Pillow" Lindell... HEAR ME OUT... I don't agree with his politics, but the dude is hilarious.
- I couldn't find mirth in his behavior. It disturbs me to greatly how completely a man is willing to hollow himself out so entirely, so they can be filled entirely with nothing but hatred.
  So I must disagree. What humor is actually found in misery?
- He's gonna Mcafee himself eventually anyway.

What's also crazy thing that no one mentions that these money numbers are just a digital stamp. There's no real currency or value backing it
- Dude the moment that becomes real we all lose everything. THEY have their wealth tied up in non liquid assets....ie VALUE behind the numbers. When monetary value collapses All of us tied up with digital value that means nothing are screwed.... The wealthy will loseout too but they're protected.
  Edit: Digital value = us dollars in the bank...market or notes under your bed. Not talking crypto anything.

Management is a skill. You can collectivize property relations and keep the positions of Capital Managers. Moreover, in underdeveloped sectors, Markets are a good way to rapidly develop a framework that can then be folded into the public sector and centrally planned by the degree to which it has developed.
Do we need Capital Owners? No, we don't need any. We will still need managers and directors of Capital, even within Communism, ie Central Planners. If the question is how many Capitalists do we need, the answer is 0. If the question is how many Capital managers and planners do we need, the number is much higher than 0.
- Management is a skill
  Of course it is. And production is a skill. Why is one being paid so much more than the other?
  
  Because they have all the power within Capitalism. I'm a Communist, I want to collectivize property, we can have economic planning of public property and those positions would look similar to CEOs without the ownership aspect.
  People seem to be misinterpreting my comment as justification for Capitalism, when it's the opposite.

none of them. you don't need a CEO to keep a drink at $1 a can. I know it's a meme but y'all libs will go too far with it and coopt it into "awww we can't hurt Elon musk he's too uWu smol bean" by the weekend. I saw what you did with brat summer.
- No clue what libs you're talking about, gonna guess ur using the word lib too broadly when you mean neo-lib. All the actual libs i know have had guillotine on their wishlist for years now.
- You went from "I like the tea is cheap" to "I bet you're in love with Elon musk and I hate liberals" in like... No steps at all.
- You want someone at the top of the management hierarchy. You can call that guy a CEO or not, but it's the same job. You can take away private investment and have the workers own the means of production at that company, but it's still the same job. You can flatten that hierarchy until it resembles the terrain of Kansas, but it's still the same job. You can pay that guy only somewhat more than the median wage at the company, but it's still the same job.

Not a single fucking one

Lower on the list, but still on the list.
Discussion not worth having tbh
- Surely, you don't think the CEO making 50k a year managing a small business needs to be on the chopping block.

He's not a CEO any more, but Bill Gates is on a mission to die a mere millionaire, and I think has already given away more than half his net worth.
- Bill Gates is a massive piece of shit. Don't let all the propaganda he puts out there fool you. When you start looking closer at his so-called charity work it's not nearly as pretty as you might think.
  
  I personally prefer all billionaires follow his path.
  I've looked at his charities too over the last few years and didn't see anything that was questionable.
  Anything you want to call out?
  
  Could you be a little bit more specific with your criticisms of his charity?
  
  Some of that propaganda is in the form of material help to people around the world. Like sure, he's not great, no question. But if every other CEO funded global healthcare to the extent he did to whitewash their own problems, I wouldn't complain. Sure his charity work is by no means ideal, but even the ugly charity he does actually winds up saving lives.
  
  Yeah let's hear it. Please elaborate on your accusations and don't be so vague.
  
  [citation needed]
  
  At least he helped more people than you. So where does that put YOU?
- Bill Gates' net worth has grown substantially despite his philanthropy, rising from $126.8 billion in early 2023 to $156 billion in December 2024.
  Regarding COVID-19 vaccines, Gates actively opposed patent waivers and influenced Oxford University to privatize its vaccine through AstraZeneca rather than keep it open-source. He pushed for maintaining intellectual property rights through COVAX, despite public funding supporting vaccine development.
  Not a good guy by any metric.
  
  Thats a good criticism but the CEO he put in charge of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation went against him and supported waiving the patents anyways, which Biden and the WTO went ahead and did regardless.
  His argument against the TRIPS terms was that it wouldn't actually increase production, that every facility capable of producing vaccines was doing so regardless of the patent's costs especially given that they only had to worry about intellectual properties when importing to countries where the patent is held.
  He was wrong, I give you that, I think there is no room to be penny pinching and arguing when even 1 more vaccine could have saved lives. However, that doesn't even come close to offsetting the number of lives he has saved or improved by handing out vaccines and medicines for free across Africa. The vast majority of Gates' opponents are generally not fond of Dark Skinned people.
- Watching people totally fall for Gates’s incredibly shallow face value self image propaganda bullshit is wild to me. FUCK that guy, so hard. One of the biggest reasons we have enshittification today is this one man.
  
  My boss checks in on me occasionally with directness, and did so the other day:
  "viva, how's it going?"
  "I want to fight Bill Gates."
  This is understood to mean, "windows is fucked. My computer is fucked. All of this massive, utterly brutal buttfucking inconvenience could have been avoided at some point, and now isn't, because [our company] bought so hard into Microsoft's "business solutions" that there's no turning back, and because of the nuances of the problems you've asked me to solve, I am facing said brutal buttfucking inconvenience, and I'm mad about it."
  
  incredibly shallow face value self image propaganda bullshit is wild to me.
  He's given away billions of dollars, and that's face value to you? Besides, he hasn't been in control at Microsoft for decades at this point.
  
  Yeah how dare he run a tax scheme by
  *checks notes
  Saving millions of people across all of Africa by providing free healthcare for treatable diseases and potential pandemics?
- He was kind of a prick becoming a billionaire, so his is more of a redemption arc than a hero's journey.
  
  Possibly, but still better than most.
- Another bait?

BofA is totally worth keeping around
- Bofa deez nuts maybe, but the Bank of America can fuck all the way off
  
  This is the best possible answer.
- Terrible bank, like most that aren't credit unions, they have over leveraged tens of billions against individual account balances and been a leaky sieve in tech security.
  
  I have no idea why most people don't use credit unions. I guess just ignorance. My "overdraft fee" is "keep at least $50 in your savings account and we won't charge you one."
- Nice bait?

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