Are America’s CEOs overpaid? | From OpenAI To Stripe, Artificial Intelligence Is Remaking The Cloud | ESG is at a crossroads. A new framework can help companies avoid box-checking exercises | Shein, the fast fashion darling mulling a U.S. IPO, opens up about forced labor, data privacy

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Are America’s CEOs overpaid? - The Economist

“We’re fed up with falling behind,” declared Shawn Fain, the boss of America’s United Auto Workers (UAW), last month after the union began a campaign of intermittent strikes at Ford, General Motors (GM) and Stellantis, America’s “big three” carmakers. A month in, the two sides are still at loggerheads. Jim Farley, Ford’s chief executive, has argued that the 36% pay rise over four years demanded by the striking workers would cripple his business. The UAW has countered that the average pay of the big three’s CEOs is 40% higher than it was in 2019, compared with 6% for the union’s members, which is well below inflation. Last year Mr Farley raked in $21m in pay, Carlos Tavares, his counterpart at Stellantis, $25m and Mary Barra of GM, $29m. The average full-time UAW member made less than $60,000. (Exor, the biggest shareholder in Stellantis, part-owns The Economist’s parent company.)

America’s bosses are certainly well compensated. After languishing in the 2000s, median pay for CEOs of big companies in the S&P 500 index has climbed by 18% over the past decade, adjusting for inflation, twice the rise in the median full-time wage in America. The typical S&P 500 boss earned more than $14m last year, according to figures from MyLogIQ, a data provider. That is around 250 times as much as the average worker. It is also more than bosses earn in Britain (where chiefs of FTSE 100 firms took home just shy of $5m), let alone in France and Germany (where CEOs are paid still less). Some American corporate chieftains rake in many times that. In 2022 Sundar Pichai of Alphabet, a tech titan, received a $218m stock award, following a similar-sized bounty in 2019. In 2021 David Zaslav of Warner Bros Discovery, a media giant, received stock options worth an estimated $203m (subject to hitting certain performance hurdles).

Investors, for their part, do not seem overly bothered. Last year only 4% of S&P 500 companies failed to win majority support in (non-binding) “say on pay” votes, according to Meridian, an executive-compensation adviser. As Lucian Bebchuk of Harvard Law School explains, America’s big institutional investors pay little attention to the market-wide level of compensation, focusing instead on what share of a CEO’s pay is tied to the firm’s performance, and on how much they earn relative to other bosses. American CEOs’ pay is “so stratospheric we have become numb to it”, says Amy Borrus of the Council of Institutional Investors, which represents pension funds and other asset managers. Ordinary Americans, though, are furious. A survey in 2019 by David Larcker and Brian Tayan of Stanford University found that 86% of them thought bosses were overpaid. Is it time, then, to rein in ceo pay?

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From OpenAI To Stripe, Artificial Intelligence Is Remaking The Cloud - Forbes

From left to right: Databricks cofounder Ali Ghodsi; Anthropic cofounders Dario and Daniela Amodei; OpenAI cofounder Sam Altman.

Artificial intelligence is transforming cloud computing as we know it, as evidenced by Forbes’ latest Cloud 100 list of the sector’s best privately-held companies. This year, AI is everywhere: New No. 1 OpenAI and No. 2 Databricks are supplying tools to help companies build AI features. No. 3 Stripe, a fintech company, adopted the tech to combat fraud; No. 4 Canva embedded AI features into its design software; No. 7 Grammarly launched a writing assistant that uses AI to spit out paragraphs of text almost instantaneously.

“The feeling I get talking to customers is everyone feels like this is a technology of transformation targeted specifically at their industry,” Dario Amodei, CEO of list newcomer No. 73 Anthropic, told Forbes. “Except, it’s targeted specifically at every industry.”

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ESG is at a crossroads. A new framework can help companies avoid box-checking exercises - Fortune

ESG is at a crossroads. Stakeholders have varying expectations, priorities, and requests. Standards are changing. Laws attempt to speak a single language but prescribe different activities and disclosures. Definitions of ESG vary among standards bodies, rating organizations, regulators, legislators, and investor stewardship groups. Some people advocate abandoning the term altogether in favor of other concepts such as sustainability, impact, or materiality. And there are those who say ESG is misguided–or even value-destroying.

However, ESG isn’t going away. Companies receive daily requests–and more recently, demands–for ESG information from investors, customers, regulators, and lenders. Speak to anyone advising corporate management, and they’ll tell you that the number of inquiries and requirements is increasing, not decreasing–and that the inquiries are becoming more insistent and the requirements more burdensome.

Institutional investors need information about ESG performance because their clients demand it. Customers need ESG commitments to achieve their own ESG goals. And based on research from MSCI and McKinsey & Company, ESG data may even get you a discounted cost of capital from your lenders.

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Shein, the fast fashion darling mulling a U.S. IPO, opens up about forced labor, data privacy - CNBC

It's no secret that Shein has ambitions to go public, but the fast-fashion juggernaut will have to overcome a slew of hurdles before it can win over Wall Street.

The digitally native retailer skyrocketed to prominence during the Covid-19 pandemic after shoppers across the globe fell in love with its fashion-forward designs, endless assortment and dirt-cheap prices.

The company has a reported valuation of $66 billion and has tapped former Bear Stearns investment banker Donald Tang to be its executive chair and public face.

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