Theo Francis
Appearances
WSJ What’s News
Trump Administration Denies That Signal Chat Shared Classified Info
In recent years, we'd seen the proliferation of these things that some people call moonshot or swing-for-the-fences pay packages. So you might see $100 million or, in some cases, $200 million, $250 million. In Elon Musk's case, originally $2.3 billion worth of stock in the mix. And if the company and the executive reach certain milestones, then that pay kind of gets unlocked, as it were.
WSJ What’s News
Trump Administration Denies That Signal Chat Shared Classified Info
That really started picking up steam after Elon Musk's 2018 pay package, which got a lot of attention at the time. And you saw packages that kind of emulated that. What we've seen, though, more recently is a real decline in the number of those kinds of packages.
WSJ What’s News
Trump Administration Denies That Signal Chat Shared Classified Info
You see a lot of different responses, but one of the common ones is that some boards say, our executives are not responsible for setting tax rates. They're not responsible for trade conditions. They're not responsible for economic conditions generally. And so in many cases, boards remove certain kinds of effects from the calculations of performance that lead to executive pay.
WSJ What’s News
Trump Administration Denies That Signal Chat Shared Classified Info
At this point, that's really hard for boards to do. They're looking at and trying to set 2025 pay now. This is kind of the season in which they do it. And I've heard that some boards are trying to figure out whether and how to actually remove those components, the back and forth, up and down of the trade war right now. It's really hard to plan in those circumstances.
WSJ What’s News
Trump Administration Denies That Signal Chat Shared Classified Info
We've heard that from executives talking about running their companies. It's also hard to plan pay targets and performance targets for compensation in that kind of environment.
WSJ What’s News
DOGE’s Next Target: Government Office Space
You have a few cases around the country, several where really pension plans or other retirement plans have run into real trouble. And that's usually when the employees of these religious organizations discover that they don't have the same protections that other employees and other retirees have.
WSJ What’s News
DOGE’s Next Target: Government Office Space
So in a few cases, you've had situations where pension plans have not been funded, or the employer goes bankrupt and can't meet those obligations, and the retirees are the ones who really bear the brunt of it.
WSJ What’s News
DOGE’s Next Target: Government Office Space
Often people don't find out that the plans are underfunded until... you know, it's too late or until they are at risk of losing their benefits. Nobody knows exactly how many people are covered by these kinds of plans. The IRS was able to identify almost 600,000 people who contributed to church retirement plans, and they contributed about $1.8 billion in that one year alone in 2019.
WSJ What’s News
DOGE’s Next Target: Government Office Space
Another analysis by the Government Accountability Office found that a variety of kinds of retirement plans at a relatively small number of denominations had a total of $89 billion in assets. So it's a lot of people and a lot of money. We also don't know how many times these kinds of plans fail and really leave their retirees and employees in the lurch.
WSJ What’s News
DOGE’s Next Target: Government Office Space
We don't really have an overall picture because one of the things that these plans don't have to do is report on their financial status, either to the Department of Labor or the IRS or, in most cases, to the participants themselves.