Mozilla lays off 70

Many CEOs derive a significant portion - often even the majority - of their compensation from performance-based bonuses. Compensation not only reflects performance, it is directly tied to it.

Short-term performance, which can often warp long-term incentives

Not always attributable to executives. The company may just have some inertia and the guy who negotiates the best employment contract wins.

The price of oil goes up, and all the oil company executives get bonuses (it sounds silly, but this genuinely does happen).

A lot of these compensation packages are well intended, but they aren't without problems. People who make bad decisions often get performance bonuses regardless.

Yeah, they get a metric shitton of money if the company performs poorly and two metric shittons if the company performs well.

Those are the ones you hear about in the press, but the press looks for outrage.

"CEO earns 10x less than previous year due to declining stock price linked to market share loss" is not a headline to set pulses racing. Performance linked comp works OK most of the time. Sometimes CEOs negotiate deals that are terrible for the company, where they get paid lots even if the firm tanks. My experience has been that this usually happens when the firm is in deep trouble anyway, the CEO knows they probably can't turn it around, but will have a tarnished reputation regardless. Getting experienced people to try and turn the Titanic is expensive and many will want a big reward for even trying.

Also, badly run companies do things like sign bad deals. But it's a circular problem. If they were well run they wouldn't be signing bad CEO deals to begin with.

Yes, Marissa Mayer being an excellent example!

Millions/Billions were paid out in bailout money, to the very same people responsible for collapsing the housing market in 2009. Compensation for that level is complete bullshit.

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/31/business/31pay.html

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/16b-of-bank-bailout-went-to-exe...

https://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/must-read/banks-paid...

Didn't that bailout earn American taxpayers money in the end?

Sure, the ones that actually paid back with interest. But that doesn't help the 'performance bonus' discussion. These people destroyed the housing market, then got bailed out by the people they destroyed, THEN got paid millions/billions in bonuses for doing it.

Housing market got destroyed by people not paying back their loans. Assigning this to be a moral responsibility of banks and regulators is simplistic and naive.

I had to search for this excellent clip from Margin Call, which explains this better than I could: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2f2kGHcdJYU

It was much deeper than that. While you're partially correct, that people not paying back their loans is what ultimate set off the collapse, the reason for it was the straight greed, and manipulation of the repackaged junk sub-prime mortgages by the banks. Collateralized Debt Obligations, and even worse CDO-Squared, bundled up complete crap, and sold them off with triple-A ratings. When the mortgagor failed to pay, those CDOs were finally downgraded and became worthless, losing banks hundreds of billions. Predatory practices on homeowners, and bank greed.