Well I applaud their ability to get that bag. But in terms of raising the floor for a lot of people, this is not that.

I don't feel strongly about these salaries beyond them being an indication of deep dysfunction in the system. This is not healthy, for a market or for a society. No-one should be paid these amounts but I don't care about these developers because they don't run the system.

I've benefited from devs being paid well. Not that well. But same thing in concept.

Would you say that same thing about executives and CEOs?

I'm guessing not, but both the AI expert and the CEO are agents for the owner class: it is owners like Elon and Sam Altman that are deciding to pay these huge salaries and they are doing it for the same reason that corporate boards of directors pay CEOs huge salaries: namely, to help the owners accumulate more capital.

I appreciate the sentiment but the issue is still really clear. This guy getting so much money hasn't made anything more equal, it's just added another individual to an elite class of wealth. Had these salaries been distributed across everyone as it is clearly affordable to do, it would be a different story.

This gentleman now has an entirely different set of problems to everyone else. Do you think he will now go on to advocate for wealth equality, housing affordability, healthcare etc, or do you think he'll go buy some place nice away from his former problems and enjoy his (earned) compensation in peace?

People also complain about the high salaries of CEOs. A lot of opposition to labor being paid what they are due is more about envy than class consciousness.

That is not an appropriate comparison as sports stars(you write it yourself) is in the entertainment industry - they are paid for their talent.

A 1b $ anonymous software engineer is likely leading to 5000 more revenue than a 200k talented Ai engineer.

I don't get the down votes. Any good leftist likes seeing skilled workers having unskilled rentiers over the barrel.

Personal anecdote time. One of the people named in the press as having turned down one of these hyper-offers used to work in an adjacent team, same "pod" maybe, whatever adjacent. That person is crazy smart, stands out even among elite glory days FAANG types. Anyways they left and when back on the market I was part of the lobby to get them back at any price, had to run it fairly high up the flagpole (might have been Sheryl who had to sign off, maybe it was Mark).

Went on to make it back for the company a hundred fold the first year. Clearly a good choice to "pay over market".

Now it's a little comical for it to be a billion or whatever, that person was part of a clique of people at that level and there's a lot of "brand" going into a price tag like that: the people out of our little set who did compilers or whatever instead of FAIR are just as good and what is called "AI" now is frankly not that differentiated (the person in question maintained as much back in the day).

But a luck and ruthlessness hire like Zuckerberg on bended knee to a legitimate monster hacker and still getting dissed? Applause. I had Claude write a greentext for the amusement of my chums. I recommend it kek.

What percentage of the income is going towards funding future socialism?

Because if it's not funding the revolution (peaceful or otherwise) why exactly would a leftist applaud these salaries?

it was never about rising salaries, it was always about upper middle class urbanites showing fake concern towards the lower class by disparaging people who earn more than them.

one would think that a talented academic/researcher getting a 1B salary would impress the socialist people but it doesn't because it was never about that. it was about bringing rich people down and not much else.