More: Initial Public Payday
Graphic: Executive Pay
Facebook's initial public offering filings revealed the salary of its top execs as a percentage of company income, which is four times that of Apple's executive staff. How does it compare to other top American companies?
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Book Review: What America’s Banana King Teaches Us About Capitalism
Americans puzzling over the role of today’s powerful corporations — Bain Capital, Goldman Sachs, Google — may profit from considering the example of the United Fruit Company.
It seems almost quaint to think that a company specializing in bananas might have once been considered a capitalist giant on the level of today’s firms, but so it was — at its height in the first half of the last century, United Fruit owned one of the largest private navies in the world. It owned 50 percent of the private land in Honduras and 70 percent of all private land and every mile of railroad in Guatemala.
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Why Companies Can No Longer Afford to Ignore Their Social Responsibilities
In 1970, the economist and Nobel laureate Milton Friedman published an article in The New York Times Magazine titled, “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.” In the article, he referred to corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs as “hypocritical window-dressing,” and said that businesspeople inclined toward such programs “reveal a suicidal impulse.” Even four decades ago, at a time of growing public concern for the environment, his views represented the general skepticism and contempt with which many in Corporate America viewed CSR.
