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Nokia's Elop Set To Receive $25 Million Bonus After Acquisition
jones_supa writes with an update on the Microsoft purchase of Nokia. From the article: "Stephen Elop, the former Nokia Oyj chief executive officer who is rejoining Microsoft, is set to get more than $25 million if the Finnish company completes the sale of its handset business to the software maker. Microsoft will pay 70 percent of the projected total amount of about 18.8 million euros ($25.5 million), and Nokia the remainder, according to a proxy filing by Nokia today. The value of Elop's reward is estimated using Nokia's Sept. 6 closing share price and may still change. Nokia shares have dropped by more than a third since Elop was hired on Sept. 10, 2010, even with the stock's gain since the sale to Microsoft was announced. Nokia shareholders are set to vote on the transaction Nov. 19. Elop will move back to Microsoft as part of the $7.2 billion takeover. He is also a candidate to succeed Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer."
Good to see the old boys network is thriving.
They don't choose candidates with successful track records, just the ones who they play golf with.
From the sounds of it, Elop completely fucked Nokia, is selling the farm to Microsoft, and will make out like a bandit and get the chance to be considered to run Microsoft.
All in all, I'd say the shareholders of Nokia are getting the shaft here. This is just corporate pillaging.
...the phrase "thirty pieces of silver" keeps coming to mind...
I wonder how Elop can sleep at night for getting $25mil to tank a company.
But I suppose it isn't too hard on a pillow made of 250,000 Benjamins
I could have run their business into the ground for half that much!
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
Give me a call if you have a successful company you want to a) run into oblivion and 2) sold for nothing. I can do it for let's say $25 mill.
That'd be like giving captain Schettino a bonus when the Costa Concordia is salvaged, even though he's the dolt who sank it.
Circumcision is child abuse.
when, not if; Elop rejoins Microsoft; Google and the Android phone developers could reward him another $1 bn for achieving the same spectacular success he did at Finland.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
If he had not managed to foist Nokia off to his buddies at Microsoft then Nokia would have eventually gone out of business or sold for a much, much lower price. Therefore, $25 million is a pittance compraed to the billions that Nokia shareholders would have lost had the deal not gone through.
How is this even legal? It is almost as if nobody sees it as a bribe because they don't think a bribe can happen in the open. The SEC needs to put a stop to this acquisition. It smacks of fraud on a massive level.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
I wonder if the payment will be in pieces of silver ?
E-lop. Phone. Hoooome.
Assuming 98,000 Nokia employees, that's about $255 per scalp.
Have gnu, will travel.
I'll take, "Professions You Get Paid No Matter How Much You Fuck Up" for $25 million Alex.
Excerpt from the new reality gameshow: Shareholder Jeopardy
So let me get this right. He took over Nokia 3 years ago. In that time their stock price has dropped by more than a third. In any way you measure it, he has failed as the head of the company. So they decide to sell to Microsoft, because he has been unable to do his job well and do anything to keep them from sinking further. And he will be REWARDED with $25 million?!?!?! So for helping his company continue to fail, he will get a $25 million dollar bonus over what is I'm sure a fairly ridiculous compensation package.
And to top it off, he is on the short list of people to become the new Microsoft CEO? They really are considering basically giving him a huge promotion for being unable to turn Nokia around and letting them get so bad off that selling to MS was their only option? CEOs are absolutely rewarded for failure, because his performance can't be seen as anything other than a failure.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
Money paid for value received. Microsoft got what they wanted, an artificially undervalued cell division, and paid accordingly.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Sounds almost exactly like how Belluzzo was rewarded for killing HPUX, PA-RISC, IRIX, and 64-bitMIPS in favor of WinNT-on-Itanium. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Belluzzo
I knew this was going to happen. EVERYONE knew this was going to happen the moment we heard a Microsoft guy was going to be put in charge. EVERY step this guy has taken has led to this.
I always remember Nokia as being a point of national pride for the finns! They loved to brag about it, being in the forefront of a hot and growing tech industry. Why are they letting an American company walk in and scoop it all up in what is essentially a giant fraudulent business exchange? So many high-tech jobs lost. Where is the outrage?
I know Finland isn't the US, but why haven't executives been hauled in front of whatever the equivalent of congress is there to explain why a key industry has been sabotaged and sold overseas?
Before anyone bothers to carefully craft a response to the poster above, have a look at his comment history: this is one of the clearest examples of a Microsoft shill that I've ever seen on Slashdot.
On a huge pile of money!
0 1 - just my two bits
One loser after anther.
Say No to Microsoft and kick Elop in his ass.
Read the blogs following Nokia and check financial statements. Although declining, Noka was profitable company until Elop took over.
Then sharp decline and mercy killing by Microsoft.
It had very bad smell from beginning.
It's really having the connections.
Those people like to pat themselves on the back and exclaim how "they worked hard" to get where they are but the truth of the matter is that they knew the right people. They were a member of the lucky sperm club. Most CEOs come from wealthy families who then got them into an Ivy League school where they hobnobbed with other wealthy connected people.
We live in an aristocracy in the US; not a meritocracy that the propaganda will have you believe. Sure, if you're smart and work hard, you'll eventually get into upper middle management or have a little pissant small business, but to get into the billionaire or CEO class where you get rich regardless of your abilities or merit? That takes being born to the right family.
And they've closed and locked the door behind them. No new members allowed, boys and girls. That's why we need a 100% inheritance tax for all wealth above a million dollars. So, you die and you have 5 million, well, you either give away 4 million to a REAL charity or the tax man takes it and blows on some shit.
And by real charity - let me ask this, if Bill Gates is soooo charitable, then why is he STILL the richest man in the World?!
To me charity is like Andrew Carnegie - actually giving it away and his case, just about all of it.
In finnish prison.
Enough said.
Given that Jolla is having their second round of pre-orders today (in Finland only), I expect Finns, angry at the looting of one of Finland's biggest and most well-known companies by Microsoft, are more likely than ever to throw money at a Finnish phone maker founded by ex-Nokia guys who quit and/or were fired under Elop...
This is your mission, if you choose to accept it:
Infiltrate Nokia. Drop symbian, any non-redmond-based OS and the stock price into a bottomless pit.
In case you get caught, you will be awarded with $25'000'000.
Mission accomplished: murder Nokia and sell it off at pennies on a dollar. I'd say Elop performed spectacularly, and well deserves his bonus.
We have the Peter Pinnacle when Ballmer announced he was leaving. I guess this makes this situation the old, tried and tested, Peter Principle. I've already dumped my Microsoft stock a long time ago but when there's speculation that this retard will be Ballmer's replacement, I can't help but think that shareholders and customers will be wanting Ballmer back! That in and of itself is abhorrent but if you're going to get burned in a fire or boiled in oil I guess it pretty much doesn't matter which path you choose, you're dead. Let's hope that the executive search committee looking into Ballmer's replacement at least chooses somebody with vision and conviction in terms of setting a strategy to move Microsoft forward again.
To paraphrase Obi-wan "This is not the executive your looking for."
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
...got deluded. Nokia reminds me of this comic strip http://static.nichtlustig.de/toondb/020111.html
"A high ranking VP of a corporate giant becomes the new CEO of a company in a different business, in a different country. He doesn’t sell his home in Seattle, nor does his family move with him, even though he’s ostensibly going to be there permanently. Over the next three years, he makes counterintuitive decisions that abandon his new company’s core strengths, and their value plummets to a tiny fraction of what it was.
You get the idea. Essentially, the theory here — and this has been floating around for a while — is that Stephen Elop became the CEO of Nokia to soften the company up for the Microsoft takeover left Nokia without its hardware business."
It is so blindingly obvious. If anyone doesn't see this, they are beyond hope. One might quote the Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice....", but it simply does not account for the amount of maneuvering and the number of counterintuitive senseless decisions that made this acquisition possible. What is more applicable is: "If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck,.....".
On a big pile of money, surrounded by many beautiful ladies.
Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon what's the difference? All steal money from devs and control with walled gardens.
..to psychopaths in suits, now.
IMHO Elop exceeds L Ron Hubbard, for just unabashed and open blatant evil, and destruction for financial gain. I mean, what Hubbard did was evil too, but it could be argued that he didn't really see what he was doing as destructive; it was just trivial low-stakes fraud, and most of the people who have been bilked by Scientology probably would have found some other way to get themselves bilked anyway. But Elop actually destroyed a company, which didn't really need to die, and there was no reason it should have been fated for that. And arguably (if you're a big N900 fan) in doing that, he retarded the technological state of the art for who-knows-how-many years.
What a guy!
The thing I don't get, is how so clearly and openly working directly against the financial interests of Nokia's stockholders, can possibly not have been against any laws. Even if he didn't end up in jail, you'd think Nokia's stockholders would have sued him into the poor house in civil suits.
To be that evil, and also slip through both knds of seemingly inevitable sets of consequence, makes Elop something like the brain of L Ron combined with the luck and finesse of Han Solo. It's just incredible. I hope he gets his $25M and then sells his life story to Hollywood for another $25M, just so I can know that somewhere in this world, when the stars are right, you can still find such a purity of injustice, sort of like how Josef Mengele lived right through the 1970s.
The world needs an occasional one-of-these, as a reminder for what happens when simply nobody gives a fuck about anything, and completely surrenders to utter hopelessness and resignation. Because surely that's what happened, right, Nokia people?
What was it, that spurred you to such depressed apathy, that you hired Elop? The long Finnish winters?
Quoting a related article from YLE news:
Ridiculous...
Microsoft uses it's influence to put it's executive in charge of Nokia. Executive does everything possible to destroy value in Nokia. Microsoft buys Nokia for a fraction of what it was worth before trojan executive. I don't see how the whole thing can be anything other than a carefully planned fraud perpetrated on Nokia shareholders.
no more conscience than EFlops Redmond puppet master, Vladimir Ballmer.
Executives do not play by the same rules as the rest of us. The can obviously act in the worst interests of their company and shareholders, and are never taken to task for it.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Just remember kids, if you REALLY work at it, one day you too could suck as much as that guy and get paid $25 million for it! It's the American Dream!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Don't worry folks this isn't a case of a CEO getting a payoff for pinching the company away from shareholders and giving it to his golf/bed buddy (nohomo). He stepped down as CEO so it's all cool. He's just some guy making a trade in a dark back alley in Redmond.
Elop shoulders his booty as he stepped over the rail onto the winning ship.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
First of all. Android isnt an instant success guarantee that some people seem to postulate.
Obviously you need to distinguish yourself. I mean, rock solid hardware, bloody good cameras, you know things like that.
But the big, bloody obious point to be made. Do you know a single phone manufacturer that sells more Windows phones than Android phones? I mean, quite a few have both in stock. There are enough models around that are available with either Android or Windows. Please enlighten me if there are any of those that actually sell better with Windows.
But sons of bitches -- yeah.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5MZiF-eJIM
Has there been a public reaction from olli-pekka kallasvuo or jorma ollila?
Before anyone bothers to carefully craft a response to the poster above, have a look at his comment history: this is one of the clearest examples of a Microsoft shill that I've ever seen on Slashdot.
Despite your post's high "informative" mod points (at the moment) I do not believe you are correct. I was curious, so I actually did take a look at MaWeiTao's comment history, as you suggested, and see no evidence of anything but fairly well-reasoned and balanced posts on a variety of subjects, including Microsoft, where he seems to hold a remarkably neutral position rarely seen on this forum. Perhaps that is the problem? His argument that the Slashdot community tends to harbor foaming-at-the-mouth purposeless hatred for everything Microsoft does even when they haven't really done anything wrong seems to have been right on point, and even the mods agreed with him on that particular day.
Evidence of being a Microsoft shill, I do not see. What I do see is that you launched an apparently unjustified ad hominem attack against someone you happen to disagree with. Just because this person has a slightly different opinion and/or perspective about Apple and/or Microsoft and/or Nokia than you do does not make them a shill. Did MaWeiTao arouse your ire precisely because he tends to post using a very neutral, non-confrontational tone of voice? Kind of like me? He fails to constantly attack Microsoft sufficiently so that makes him a shill? His opinions could hardly be considered praise. They're just neutral.
I now wait with bated* breath for someone to baselessly accuse me of being a Microsoft shill as well, for having the temerity to defend someone who has been accused (and apparently convicted by some) of being a Microsoft shill.
* Yes that is the correct spelling. Look it up. A dictionary lookup a day keeps ignorance at bay. I just made that up.
So, it was a good run where Elop managed to change the "embrace, extend, extinguish" mantra into "embrace, f*ck it up, s*ck it up".
Good job. Well done. Nokia shareholders are probably the most happy about it.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
Ellop (with double l) means 'to steal' in hungarian.
Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer. - Ludwig von Mises
The TRUE horror of how corrupt the system is will become clear if Elop really does become the next MS CEO. Because that would be the smoking gun. Despite what everyone seems to think Elop is far from a shoe-in for next CEO of MS. And ruining your previous company is hardly a good thing to be considered for such a position.
UNLESS of course he didn't screw up at Nokia but did exactly what his bosses at MS wanted him to do. But then rewarding him with the CEO title would be all the evidence even the most rabid wallstreet fan would need.
If you hire a hitman to kill your wife you can't then reward that hitman in full public view without providing evidence there is a link between the two of you. That is why brown envelopes exist, you pay your assasin in secret, away from prying eyes. You don't pay them in your financial report.
Personally I think something much simpler is going on, Ballmer and Elop are just the type to fully belief that this was the best thing. That Elop did NOT kill of Nokia but rather saved IT!
When people live in ivory towers for to long, they really start to believe their yes-men.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Has there been a public reaction from olli-pekka kallasvuo or jorma ollila?
At least Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo commented on it. Basically his general opinion was that "sure it is dramatic, but I am sure the board made the right decisions".
I think that they should not have used the Sept 6th stock price in the calculation. Instead, they should've used the stock price of the day before the selling was announced. The resulted spike in the stock price should not be in the calculation. It's wrong to use the stock price, that spiked, after the announcement.
Damn traitors... Well lets hope he does indeed take over as next CEO of Microsoft, that would pretty much guaranty that in few short years Microsoft would no longer be dominant software maker or dominant operating system for that matter...
Sad story of Nokia, From number one Mobile phone manufacturer to ruins in few short years...
Since he went and revealed to be part of the Belluzzo club of moles, it would only the fair and just if Elop was awarded title of "The Microsoft Mole". Don't you agree?
If Microsoft offers to "Partner" with you, run and don't look back.
mission accomplished
He did such a bang-up job at Nokia, can't wait to see what he'll do with MS.
Elop joined a phone company who proved over and over that they didn't understand the new phone market was about the value adds and not the phones. He then managed to find a way to keep the company from going bankrupt long enough while still decreasing its value long enough to make it inexpensive enough to sell off for a bunch of money. He saved tons of jobs, successfully killed counterproductive relationships with Intel and Symbian, both companies who would keep the majority of the app store profits to themselves. And all the while, as Nokia died while trying to be a handset seller, hooked up with Microsoft who could never enter the phone business themselves without giving Nokia grounds to sue them for billions or buying Nokia and making it an accessory to their mobile business.
If he and Ballmer planned this, they probably saved Nokia, kept their share holders from losing 100% instead of 30% and saved tons of jobs, viliages and more.
If it happened by convenience caused by negligence... It still had the same effect.
Too many people here base their opinion on a false belief that Nokia would have done better another way.Their internal corporate culture is well documented as having been broken. They invested billions in projects like Symbian because of stupid ideas like "it'll run on much less hardware than the other operating systems". They made their platform suck for everything by trying to force that approach. So they put 33mhz CPUs in their phones when everyone else out 200Mhz CPUs in. Sure! The OS ran great on that. Same as if you put Windows or any other OS on it. But app developers were screwed. Web browsers sucked. Games sucked. Graphics sucked. But the battery lasted long.
Apple, Qualcomm and everyone else used bigger, faster CPUs and Nokia kept using crap. Apple makes their own CPUs. Samsung, Qualcomm, etc... All did. Nokia kept trying to use off the shelf general purpose crap. When using TI OMAP chips, they didn't even make the DSP core work which would have helped massively. Nokia just did it all wrong.
Look at Sony... Still doesn't understand the phone market. Ericsson is gone. HTC and Samsung are unique because they both use the cheapest engineers in the cheapest countries to develop phones to be manufactured as cheaply as possible. So they can make a profit on a phone and cut a profit. Samsung (not HTC) competes against Apple by making all their own parts and depending on no one else.
Microsoft might be able to make this work if they do phones like tablets.
How do you say that?