For most people, passive income is a bit of extra pocket change that requires minimal effort to earn to supplement a main source of income. For Steve Ballmer, it’s $1 billion.
It's not for doing nothing, it's for doing things he already did. He got the stock as part of his compensation plan at Microsoft.
And a dividend of $0.75 per share is 0.2% interest at the current share price, he could get more in a savings account and 20x that in a CD or something. The dividend isn't crazy high. He just had a shitload of their stock.
Executive compensation as a whole is a story, but Steve Ballmer is not doing anything particularly noteworthy.
stock ownership need to have an expiration date. Sure he did work to reclaim the gains of these shares, but at a certain point these stocks need to be relinquished and shared among the real contributors of the company so they could also get a taste of their work. You can't keep leeching off of people like this all the time, or whats the point of having kids and procreation overall ? Even 1 billion$ isn't much to make a globe changing endeavour like space travel, but its too much that if he chose to keep having coke injected directly into his body for the rest of his life he would still have money left. The mere existence of this person is just a nuisance, like many anonymous others
haha! though i didn't bother thinking it up, still i dont mind being enlightened in that regard. I think anything that would ensure a constant supply of serotonin would be a good fit. But now you will have tolerance issues to deal with ..