The Matt Walsh Show - Ep. 1859 - Get Your Pitchforks. Woke CEOs Are Way Overpaid.

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00:00:30.000 If you're like most Americans, you probably feel the pinch of higher prices.

00:00:34.360 Energy is rising, food is rising, housing is rising.

00:00:37.040 By all accounts, the cost of living will prove to be the decisive factor in the upcoming elections,

00:00:41.720 as it was in 24 and 2022, and has been in basically every national election in the world,

00:00:47.220 certainly since the pandemic.

00:00:49.540 Inflation and a declining quality of life for many Americans has been the defining issues of the decade.

00:00:55.180 Today, we're going to talk about one group of people who is not feeling the pinch, at least financially, and that is America's CEOs.

00:01:04.340 Together, they've managed to weather the storm quite well.

00:01:08.180 And today, I'm going to ask something that you don't often hear from commentators on the right, which is, are these CEOs really worth $50 million a year?

00:01:17.480 Is that possible?

00:01:19.220 Now, let's consider the case of one of them.

00:01:22.040 This is United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby. Here's a photo of this guy. Kirby is in many ways the

00:01:29.460 perfect embodiment of America's CEO class. He took a company in decline in an industry notorious for

00:01:35.400 degradation and somehow made the experience worse. Last June, the company went viral when

00:01:41.620 a passenger posted this picture of a meal in business class on a flight from Barcelona to

00:01:46.980 Chicago. So take a look at this gourmet fare. And if you, too, want to try the rubber chicken

00:01:54.100 United is serving in business class, well, you can book a ticket on that route now for about

00:01:59.720 $5,000. Since taking the reins at United, Kirby has turned their in-flight experience into an

00:02:06.080 ordeal that would, in a perfect world, be prohibited by the Geneva Convention. But making the airline

00:02:12.900 And worse, isn't Kirby's only accomplishment as CEO.

00:02:16.440 One year after taking his position, he announced a new United Airlines flight school, saying, quote,

00:02:21.980 our plan is for half of them to be women and people of color.

00:02:25.820 So for Kirby, it's not enough to make you suffer on board.

00:02:28.720 He wants to train unqualified pilots hired exclusively because of their sex or color

00:02:34.100 so that eventually he can kill his customers also in fiery crashes.

00:02:39.160 Now, this, of course, is a quota system that precisely zero United Airlines passengers have ever demanded or requested or desired in any way, presumably because they value their lives. 0.83

00:02:51.200 Even after years of relentless DEI brainwashing, still every passenger on every plane in America instinctively feels a wave of relief when they see that their pilot is a white guy in his 50s with a mustache.

00:03:04.080 We all do. Don't pretend you don't.

00:03:06.640 Now, some people, not me, might then feel ashamed for having felt that relief, but we all feel it.

00:03:13.320 And one of the other big problems with United is that they have a lot of delays that Kirby has done nothing to improve.

00:03:18.980 Although, to be fair, a large part of the issue is that they have a hub at Newark, which is an airport that has the look and smell and general unpleasantness of a giant football stadium-sized port-a-potty.

00:03:29.500 Now, granted, it's in New Jersey, which is the port-a-potty of states, but still. 0.99

00:03:32.540 In any case, through it all, how much is this drag-dressing, comically incompetent moron 0.97

00:03:39.700 who has done nothing at all to help his company improve any of its services actually worth? 0.97

00:03:46.320 Well, his total compensation last year was $32.3 million, which comes out to $124,230 per workday.

00:03:57.940 Now, if Scott Kirby were a self-respecting person, he would quit his job in humiliation and shame.

00:04:04.140 He'd go into retirement or hiding in a cabin in the woods somewhere, never to return to corporate America.

00:04:09.200 But Scott Kirby is not doing that.

00:04:11.080 Instead, he's finding ways to bring even more shame on the name of his company, United Airlines.

00:04:16.360 Seems kind of unthinkable.

00:04:18.240 You know, it should be impossible to do anything that makes United Airlines look worse than it already does.

00:04:23.000 It's like doing something to further ruin the reputation of Osama bin Laden or head lice or Canada.

00:04:30.700 How can it possibly be done? But he found a way. 0.93

00:04:34.580 Recently, he started doing interviews, issuing the usual meaningless platitudes and rolling up the ladder for everybody else.

00:04:41.600 This is courtesy of Fox Business.

00:04:43.000 quote, United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby is calling for a national wealth tax and inheritance taxes

00:04:48.600 approaching 100% for certain estates, arguing that growing wealth inequality poses a threat

00:04:54.660 to American society. Kirby, who took home about $32.3 million in total compensation in fiscal year

00:05:00.080 2025, made the remarks when asked about declining public trust in corporate executives. Wealth

00:05:05.620 inequality has become a danger to our society, and we need to address that. Kirby said the airline

00:05:11.160 executive argued that a wealth tax would need to be implemented nationwide rather than at the

00:05:15.520 state level to prevent wealthy Americans from relocating to avoid paying it. Now, the thing

00:05:21.220 about Scott Kirby is that he didn't actually build anything. He started his career as a budget

00:05:25.820 analyst for the Pentagon, which notably has never passed an audit and has an annual budget of

00:05:32.120 something like, I don't know, a thousand trillion dollars, give or take, and yet always needs more

00:05:36.540 money. He rose quickly by jumping from failing airline to failing airline, like a plague of

00:05:42.260 locusts, before finally failing up to his current job at United, where somehow he's worth per year

00:05:48.380 about 30 times more than the average American will make in a lifetime. Now, remarkably, one of the

00:05:55.160 things he's focused on in the last year is pulling coach seats from his airplanes and expanding

00:06:00.620 the premium cabins. So Scott Kirby has no problem at all making it harder for middle-class families

00:06:06.980 to afford flying, even as he pretends to care about them. I mean, one thing he could do is

00:06:11.540 try to make the coach seats more comfortable, give a little more space to coach to the people

00:06:19.300 who cannot afford to pay thousands of dollars to fly. But he's not doing that. And if you want to

00:06:25.860 know why socialism is on the rise in America? Look no further than Scott Kirby. And that's why

00:06:32.260 he's on TV promoting hypothetical taxes and voicing the same banalities and platitudes that

00:06:37.220 he hopes will keep him safe when the pitchforks come. And we know, by the way, that it's nothing

00:06:44.100 but platitudes because the Treasury website includes a link where you can voluntarily give

00:06:49.640 the government money in addition to what you owe in taxes. So if Scott Kirby means what he says,

00:06:55.860 surely he'll go there right now and donate.

00:06:59.640 Why wouldn't he donate $30 million?

00:07:02.000 I mean, Scott, you don't need more than $2 million a year, do you?

00:07:05.920 Aren't you worried about wealth inequality?

00:07:08.560 But of course, Scott Kirby, who's built nothing, won't do that.

00:07:11.960 Instead, he wants to make sure that the millionaire owner of your local excavation company,

00:07:16.840 who built everything himself, can't hand anything down to his kids.

00:07:22.740 It's interesting how that works.

00:07:24.860 Now, the reason Kirby is doing this is not because he believes what he's saying.

00:07:28.180 Instead, what he's actually interested in doing is finding some way to stave off the rampaging

00:07:33.520 communist hordes that are threatening to take control of the government in a few years and

00:07:38.120 are intent on destroying the economy.

00:07:40.220 He thinks that if corporate executives start talking about taxing the rich, then maybe

00:07:45.540 the communists will be nicer to them.

00:07:48.000 Maybe they won't nationalize his airline.

00:07:49.860 Maybe they won't raise the corporate tax rate to 100%.

00:07:52.820 Maybe they won't gun him down in the streets of New York and celebrate his murder all over Reddit, as they did to the UnitedHealthcare CEO.

00:08:00.180 It's a desperation play. It's a sign of weakness.

00:08:02.500 And of course, if and when the communists do take control, all of these gestures will mean absolutely nothing to them.

00:08:09.700 They will seize his airline, confiscate his wealth, and throw him in prison or off a cliff and think nothing of it. 0.67

00:08:16.720 But the best case scenario for Scott Kirby in the event of a communist takeover is that he escapes like Alex Kerensky, who also tried to make 11th hour amends with the Bolsheviks immediately before they took over.

00:08:28.300 And of course, none of this would really matter for us because at the end of the day, Kirby is just a bureaucrat running a crappy airline in a failing industry.

00:08:36.760 But unfortunately, guys like Kirby making unreasonable amounts of money in exchange for doing nothing does have implications for us.

00:08:46.360 And that's why it's important for conservatives to acknowledge that while it's very important for highly productive, entrepreneurial, impressive innovators to be rewarded for their work, it's also true that in modern DEI-oriented corporate America, highly productive, entrepreneurial, impressive innovators only become CEO if they build the company themselves. 0.97

00:09:09.640 And it's important to distinguish between idiots like Kirby, who, should he disappear tomorrow, would be replaced by a corporate drone just like him and nothing at all would change at the company or in the world. 0.89

00:09:23.420 And, you know, between them and innovators like Elon Musk. 0.99

00:09:28.600 Now, when talentless corporate hacks who have achieved nothing, you know, make tens of millions of dollars a year, it breeds resentment.

00:09:37.160 And honestly, it should. Now, what's interesting about what's unfolding right now is that Democrats

00:09:45.240 actually seem, though, to prefer corporate shills like Kirby. Remarkably, they're targeting the

00:09:51.960 innovators specifically. The same day that Elon Musk debuted a flying car, which is one of the

00:09:58.040 most impressive things we've ever seen any company do ever, Bernie Sanders called for the abolition

00:10:04.540 of trillionaires. Really? Elon Musk, the last American who's truly innovating at scale

00:10:12.180 is the problem? The guy making flying cars and catching rockets out of the air and wants to go

00:10:20.620 to Mars and will actually do it. He's the guy we got to worry about. But this in and of itself is

00:10:26.820 extremely revealing. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren will gush endlessly about how horrible Elon

00:10:31.520 Musk is. But they'll never mention the moronic CEOs who are looting the carcasses of once great 1.00

00:10:37.100 companies they somehow control today but could never have built. And it's not just Scott Kirby. 0.98

00:10:43.380 I mean, this is a widespread problem in corporate America. One CEO you never hear Bernie Sanders

00:10:50.380 talk about is General Motors' Mary Barra. She's the former HR executive turned CEO. In fact, 0.98

00:10:57.660 Barra has been celebrated as a role model by liberals like Hillary Clinton, who once claimed

00:11:02.560 that Barra broke the steel ceiling by becoming a CEO of a manufacturing company. So how valuable

00:11:08.880 is Mary Barra? Well, last year, Toyota's CEO made $6 million. VW's CEO made $8 million.

00:11:18.480 And Mary Barra at General Motors, can you guess how much she made? $48 million in a year. 0.82

00:11:26.340 Now, wait a second. You might be asking, well, what did she do at General Motors that made her

00:11:32.760 worth eight times Toyota's CEO and six times VW's CEO? After all, Toyota is a much more

00:11:41.900 successful company according to every objective financial strategic operational metric you can

00:11:47.080 think of. Toyota is worth three times General Motors market cap. Toyota is dramatically more

00:11:52.960 profitable, generating more than $24 billion annually compared to GM's $6 billion. Toyota

00:11:58.620 sells far more cars than GM, something like $4 million more every year, and they never needed

00:12:04.500 any government bailout. They never had to declare bankruptcy. So really, what has Mary Barra done?

00:12:11.340 Well, she oversaw a failed transition to electric vehicles that cost GM more than $6 billion in 0.98

00:12:17.000 write-offs. She was overseeing the release of the 6.2-liter V8 engine that is bricking Tahoe's and

00:12:24.320 suburbans nationwide right now and is currently the subject of a federal investigation. Industry

00:12:29.140 insiders describe it as a total disaster. Meanwhile, she's laid off more than 20,000 workers, 1.00

00:12:34.500 mostly Americans, and often during the holidays. Bernie Sanders and Ro Khanna will demand that

00:12:39.980 Elon Musk be forced at gunpoint to sell his shares in his company, which is where virtually

00:12:44.640 all of his wealth comes from. They'll demonize him at every opportunity. Tim Walls will go on

00:12:48.580 stage and celebrate when Tesla stock drops. Meanwhile, Mary Barra is barely mentioned,

00:12:54.540 if she's mentioned ever. You know, I'm obviously about as far from a Bernie Sanders communist as

00:13:01.040 it is possible to get. But still, the sheer amount of money this woman is earning, given 1.00

00:13:07.640 her contributions to the company, or total lack thereof, is baffling. $48 million a year is nearly 1.00

00:13:17.640 700 times the average U.S. salary, which means the average person in the U.S. would have to work for 1.00

00:13:23.740 700 years, or about eight lifetimes, to earn what this woman makes in one single year. 0.99

00:13:31.900 Even as the CEOs of other giant car companies, companies significantly more successful than hers, 1.00

00:13:36.540 make a fraction of what she makes. Think about this. Toyota's far more successful,

00:13:42.880 but the CEO doesn't get anywhere near as much compensation. It's very similar to the situation

00:13:47.120 with Boeing a few years back when the CEO got a massive golden parachute worth tens of millions

00:13:51.440 of dollars a year, worth tens of millions of dollars after overseeing the disastrous back-to-back

00:13:56.980 crashes of the MAX airplanes, which were totally preventable. Boeing's incompetence caused those

00:14:03.900 crashes. And meanwhile, Airbus's CEO, who didn't oversee any crashes, was getting about one-third

00:14:09.920 of the Boeing CEO's compensation. Even the most rabidly pro-free market capitalist,

00:14:16.600 of which I am one, cannot honestly defend what Mary Barra is doing and making. And quite frankly,

00:14:25.840 we shouldn't have to. Conservatives should be honest to acknowledge the role that people like

00:14:30.040 bear a play in driving up the demand for socialism. The discrepancy also reminds me of this

00:14:35.980 extraordinary true story from 1984 when GM and Toyota actually agreed to work together on a

00:14:41.320 joint venture in Fremont, California. It's one of the most interesting and revealing stories in

00:14:45.900 automotive history that no one really talks about anymore. But the joint venture was called

00:14:49.640 New United Motor Manufacturing, or NUMI. And the basic idea was that for a brief shining moment,

00:14:55.660 These two arch rivals would put aside their differences and work together because they

00:15:00.200 both had something to learn from each other. And for GM, they wanted to learn how to run an auto

00:15:04.780 plant. They had a really bad dysfunctional assembly plant in Fremont that they had to close a couple

00:15:09.620 of years earlier because the employees, many of whom were diverse, never actually showed up to

00:15:14.600 work. And if they did show up, they were drunk or high. The unions were destroying the place.

00:15:19.100 They were making garbage cars. In fact, in some cases, the employees were sabotaging the cars

00:15:22.900 on purpose for the fun of it. They would do things like seal Coke bottles inside the doors just to

00:15:28.340 mess with the customers. So GM shut the Fremont plant down. They fired all the workers and they

00:15:33.160 were desperate for Toyota to fly in and show them how to run an auto plant and manufacture a car in

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00:18:03.540 real solutions for real people. Now for Toyota, the upside of the deal was that they could learn

00:18:09.720 on a day-to-day basis how to deal with American labor unions. They wanted to learn the rules and

00:18:13.860 regulations, the expectations, and so on. So as part of this arrangement, Toyota transported the

00:18:18.440 recently fired GM Fremont workers to Japan for two weeks to build cars in the Toyota factories.

00:18:24.540 And right away, they were taught a very different method for handling defects on the assembly line.

00:18:29.960 You see, back at Fremont, the GM workers were told to push every car through to the end of the line,

00:18:34.460 no matter how many problems were obvious. The idea was that the issues would get patched up

00:18:38.560 in the repair yards at some point. But in Japan, the GM workers were taught a different routine.

00:18:43.900 They were given something called an andon cord on the assembly line, and they were told to pull

00:18:48.900 the cord if they spotted any issues during production at all. And once they did so, the

00:18:52.460 line would stop. The problem, as well as its root cause, would be addressed immediately. It was a

00:18:56.840 really kind of mind-blowing experience for these employees to be around managers who actually cared

00:19:01.040 about the finished product. And the workers also received much more general training. Watch.

00:19:08.560 All new hires went through a four-day orientation. And then 450 team leaders and group leaders were

00:19:14.960 then sent to Japan for a three-week classroom and on-the-job training program.

00:19:20.800 NUMI adopted the Japanese spirit of heavy training. New production workers received

00:19:25.600 over 250 hours of training in their first six months on the job and 50 more hours of training

00:19:31.360 each year thereafter. Typical American workers were lucky to receive 40 hours in their first six

00:19:37.120 months and 20 hours annually thereafter. In the old GM system, management held all the power,

00:19:44.800 no matter how competent they actually were. Toyota, on the other hand, diffused certain

00:19:49.520 responsibilities out into the hands of the workers. So rather than like a traditional

00:19:54.080 military hierarchy, you had these small special forces units of four to six workers.

00:20:00.640 These were all cross-trained in each other's tasks, ergo all the aforementioned training time.

00:20:05.440 Now, after this brief experiment, most of the problems were resolved to the Fremont plan.

00:20:11.160 All of a sudden, they were producing good cars, and pretty much everyone had a job again.

00:20:15.100 Because as part of the deal, Toyota had agreed to rehire 85% of the workers that GM had fired,

00:20:19.560 including some of the union bosses that had caused so many of the problems. And again,

00:20:23.180 that's how this all worked out. And this is from the channel Asianometry, which kind of tells the

00:20:27.820 rest of the story. Watch. By 1986, the number of hours it took for NUMI to produce a car,

00:20:33.440 adjusted for weld number, automation, car size, and other factors, far exceeded that of the old

00:20:39.840 GM plant. It also exceeded that of a similar plant, GM Framingham, and nearly matched Toyota's

00:20:46.800 core Corolla plant in Takaoka. Absenteeism fell from 20-25% to just 3-4%. GM Fremont closed with

00:20:55.880 over 2,000 grievances outstanding. NUMI had just 700 grievances its entire first eight years.

00:21:03.440 90% of employees at the factory describe themselves as being either satisfied or very satisfied with their work.

00:21:13.080 Now, the experiment isn't perfect, mainly because it's possible that some of the other factors were involved in the workers' improvement.

00:21:19.000 In particular, many of these employees had just been fired.

00:21:21.340 You know, they had been unemployed for a while.

00:21:23.120 It stands to reason that for some of them, they got a wake-up call and they were motivated when they came back.

00:21:26.800 But for the most part, it looks a lot like Toyota simply had a much better company.

00:21:29.960 They had a better system for dealing with problems on the line.

00:21:33.440 which is to say they actually had a system at all for dealing with them.

00:21:37.360 They didn't have a diverse workforce.

00:21:39.600 They had less bureaucracy, and the result was that they produced a better product.

00:21:44.000 Now, the really funny part of that story, though, is that GM didn't apply the Toyota model to all of its plants.

00:21:49.140 The other union bosses all over the country were not interested in slowing down production

00:21:53.720 or adopting a quality over quantity model.

00:21:56.620 The experiment fizzled out, and evidently, no lessons were learned.

00:22:00.260 To this day, Toyota is a more successful company.

00:22:02.900 Toyota, again, outperforms General Motors across virtually every operational, financial, and strategic metric. 0.51

00:22:10.420 And meanwhile, their CEO is making dramatically less money than the girl boss, Mary Barra at GM, who has no idea what she's doing. 1.00

00:22:19.380 But Mary Barra gets to keep her job anyway because she's the product of a corporate environment that rewards gender more than competence. 1.00

00:22:29.800 It cannot be stressed enough. And this is one of the problems with the standard, you know, right wing conservative response to some of the economic talking points on the left is I hear conservatives say, well, but these CEOs are all there, the builders and innovators.

00:22:45.800 Yeah, some of them are. Elon Musk is. Mary Barra and all the CEOs like her are not builders. She has not built anything ever. She's not an entrepreneur. She's not a shrewd businesswoman. She has no skills. She's done nothing. She has achieved nothing.

00:23:05.080 she was put in charge of a massive multi-billion dollar company she didn't grow it to that point

00:23:11.660 she didn't have anything to do with growing it and all that has happened under her regime is

00:23:16.620 the company has become worse at everything in every way you could put literally anyone in her

00:23:22.260 job and they could do what she does which is really nothing except the company becomes a

00:23:28.160 little worse while you're there i mean anyone could just sit there behind the desk and get

00:23:31.800 paid $50 million to make the company worse. I'll do it. I'll do it for $10 million. I'll take a

00:23:40.440 massive pay cut compared to Mary Barra, and for $10 million, I will be the CEO and just not do

00:23:46.620 anything and make everything worse. I'll happily do it. I'll do it for $5 million. That's as low

00:23:52.220 as I'll go. Now, the criticisms that the left makes against millionaire CEOs, again, actually

00:23:58.940 apply to somebody like Mary Barra. And she, in fact, does not remotely deserve the salary she's 0.99

00:24:05.700 getting paid. You know, she is in effect a kind of welfare case. That doesn't mean the government 0.99

00:24:11.680 should come in and take the money, redistribute. Not saying that at all. That's not at all what I

00:24:18.200 think. In fact, we started this by talking about why these wealth taxes are retarded. And that's 1.00

00:24:22.780 what I believe. But still, the fact remains. I mean, this is just the fact. And yet she is

00:24:28.500 precisely the kind of CEO the left will not single out. Instead, they single out Elon Musk,

00:24:33.200 who is in every conceivable sense the exact opposite of Mary Barra. He is an actual builder

00:24:38.860 and innovator. Mary Barra wouldn't have a job if she were a man and everyone knows it. The company 0.89

00:24:45.300 became completely woke when it was popular to do it. They're falling apart. But the woman in charge

00:24:50.260 is rewarded with glowing profiles from various left-wing outlets while GM's employees lose 0.98

00:24:56.020 everything. That's not to single out GM. I mean, pretty much every recognizable major corporation

00:25:01.780 is like this, or many of them are. When Chrysler announced the Jeep Grand Cherokee in 1992,

00:25:07.980 the highly politically incorrect president, Bob Lutz, drove the SUV straight through a glass

00:25:12.420 window at the North American International Auto Show. Whatever American spirit was evident there

00:25:19.120 is now gone, at least in corporate America. Even Apple, one of the biggest companies on the planet,

00:25:24.860 has spent the last decade doing nothing.

00:25:28.000 They invented a pregnant man emoji, and that's about it.

00:25:31.140 Every new product from Apple is just the iPhone again,

00:25:35.380 but in a slightly different form.

00:25:37.680 Here's the iPhone attached to your wrist.

00:25:39.600 Here's the iPhone on a little stand on the kitchen counter.

00:25:42.660 Here's the iPhone you can wear on your face.

00:25:46.000 Meanwhile, this is the McDonald's CEO

00:25:48.680 famously trying to sell his company's latest burger,

00:25:53.000 which he describes not as a burger,

00:25:54.540 but as a product with all the enthusiasm of a prisoner of war being forced to eat the banana

00:25:59.640 rice in Somalia. You've probably seen this, but let's enjoy it again. We've got two quarter pound

00:26:07.840 patties, a delicious big arch sauce, and of course some lettuce. So, oh, there's so much going on with

00:26:14.640 this. First of all, let's try to get this thing. I don't even know how to attack it. Got so much

00:26:20.660 to it oh there's also some crispy onions on here as well i see those kind of coming out

00:26:25.620 all right the moment of truth

00:26:27.580 that is so good that's a big bite for a big arch it's distinctively mcdonald's only mcdonald's

00:26:39.380 could do this type of burger but it also is unlike anything else on our menu it's a delicious product

00:26:44.800 you know you've got sort of the cheeses and the gooeyness but those crispy onions as well

00:26:49.460 gives a nice texture. And of course, we've got the pickles. So just nothing but bread in that

00:26:56.620 bite. The smallest possible bite you could have taken. And even that one little bite of the big

00:27:02.760 arch sandwich almost makes him want to puke. And that's not even the worst part. The worst part is

00:27:07.400 how obviously robotic and inauthentic the whole scene was. It's like ChatGPT is talking about

00:27:13.380 eating a hamburger. And somehow this guy wasn't fired over this, even though he went on camera

00:27:18.260 made it abundantly clear that he hates the product his company is selling. He's viscerally

00:27:22.420 disgusted by McDonald's food, but McDonald's is still happy to pay him $20 million a year,

00:27:26.800 which I guess is fitting because it's $1 million for each percentage point the stock has declined

00:27:31.680 in the past year. Now, people see this happening at every major corporation and they think, well,

00:27:38.020 it doesn't make any sense. That's not fair. Now, the primary reason that America never became

00:27:43.540 communist or socialist is that for most of its history, the rich people, what was corporate

00:27:51.800 America, what back then were actual builders and innovators, they felt something called noblesse

00:27:58.120 oblige. They cared about the well-being of the country and the people in it. They voluntarily

00:28:03.520 made an effort to improve the country since the country made it possible for them to get rich in

00:28:07.500 the first place. The most famous example of this is the steel baron, Andrew Carnegie.

00:28:13.020 We're a long way from, you know, Andrew Carnegie these days with these people.

00:28:17.020 But he voluntarily gave away 90% of his fortune, funding more than 2,500 libraries across the

00:28:22.160 United States, along with the Carnegie Hall in New York, the Carnegie Institute of Technology,

00:28:26.380 which became Carnegie Mellon. He created a fund for civilians who saved other people's lives.

00:28:30.780 He created endowments and foundations to promote teaching and scientific research and peace.

00:28:35.540 He even paid for more than 7,000 church organs, because why not?

00:28:40.220 He wrote a book called The Gospel of Wealth, in which he wrote,

00:28:43.260 quote, the best means of benefiting the community is to place within its reach

00:28:46.380 the ladder upon which the aspiring can rise.

00:28:49.960 He believed that the proper administration of wealth would

00:28:52.320 bind together the rich and poor in harmonious relationship.

00:28:57.040 Now, around the turn of the 20th century, these views were actually popular in America.

00:29:01.280 After the Civil War, the banker George Peabody built schools throughout the American South.

00:29:06.420 John D. Rockefeller was responsible for eliminating hookworm.

00:29:10.940 Julius Rosenwald of Sears Corporation built 5,000 schools for black children in the South.

00:29:15.260 Henry Ford wasn't laying off workers and building defective vehicles like Henry Barra.

00:29:19.720 He was paying line workers enough that they could afford the cars they were making.

00:29:23.800 And he was the first to do that.

00:29:26.060 The small mill town of Rumford, Maine, perfectly embodied how this used to work.

00:29:30.720 It has a Carnegie library across the street from Straith Glass Park, which is full of high-end company housing for workers from the local paper mill.

00:29:40.360 The mill owner, Hugh Chisholm, took so much pride in what he was doing and what he was building that he hired an architect to build the company housing.

00:29:49.540 But not just any architect, he hired the same guy who designed the Supreme Court.

00:29:54.020 And it's still there today. You can go look at it.

00:29:56.260 just blocks away as a four-story mechanics institute also conceived by Chisholm and paid

00:30:02.520 for by the local mill so that there would be a space for working people to improve themselves

00:30:06.340 mentally, morally, socially, and physically for a low cost. So that was corporate America roughly

00:30:12.260 a century ago, back when the elites actually cared about the country. These were the attitudes and

00:30:18.840 practices that prevented a socialist revolution in America. I save time by making ordinary

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00:32:05.160 I'm counting on you. Don't wait. Head to GOPvotes.org. Make your plan to vote early today,

00:32:10.880 paid for by SLF PAC, not authorized by any candidate or candidates committee.

00:32:16.080 Millions of people win with OLG. Over 200 million wins last year alone. Common side effects of

00:32:22.160 winning with OLG? Shock, disbelief, and laughter. It's what happened to Tristan from Hamilton when

00:32:29.460 he won the $1 million Lotto 649 gold ball draw. Shock and awe, all on his lunch break. Play at

00:32:36.360 olg.ca and the next person sitting stunned in the break room could be you. With OLG, winning

00:32:43.140 happens here. Winner, Daniel. Imagine if Mary Barra, rather than taking in nearly $50 million

00:32:49.380 in compensation, built a community center and a library and hired a talented architect to 0.99

00:32:54.520 build housing for her workers. But of course, she's not doing that. 0.99

00:32:59.360 You know, she's not a visionary when it comes to the product or how to manage people. 1.00

00:33:04.200 She is stupid. And so she's just laying them off and replacing them with AI. 1.00

00:33:10.600 Good luck to her when the revolution comes.

00:33:14.140 To the extent America's rich are generous, they're giving to awful causes. The conservative

00:33:18.300 hedge fund manager, Ken Griffin, for example, just donated $3 billion to Carnegie Mellon.

00:33:22.800 for Carnegie Mellon for reasons that aren't remotely clear. Now, he's decided to fund the

00:33:27.880 university system that's destroying the country, apparently because he holds a very misguided

00:33:32.200 belief that he can fix the institution. Now, Carnegie himself, of course, endowed Carnegie

00:33:39.020 Mellon. So I'm not attacking the idea of funding schools, but Carnegie had no idea what higher

00:33:45.660 education would become. It wasn't that back when he endowed the school, but now it is.

00:33:53.100 And if you look at these institutions today, without exception, or with very few exceptions,

00:33:57.940 they're rife with censorship, propaganda, moral panics, like the deranged behavior that's

00:34:02.900 currently underway at Cornell. So no, we shouldn't be funding institutions that despise this country.

00:34:08.880 Instead, we should be allowing as many Americans as possible to invest in the companies that are

00:34:14.380 actually trying to build new technology and create more jobs. Last week, an inebriated

00:34:22.140 Indiana Democrat named Jamie West, who we spent some time on talking about over the weekend, 1.00

00:34:29.100 and a lot of fun to laugh at her, and we should, but she drunkenly made a point, 0.96

00:34:33.560 one good point, about how tech companies should have to invest in the communities 0.67

00:34:39.340 that they want to put their data centers in.

00:34:43.620 And that's totally correct.

00:34:46.400 Why not?

00:34:48.200 That's the kind of thing Republicans would be insane for opposing,

00:34:52.400 but many of them do.

00:34:54.740 Why shouldn't a company worth a zillion dollars

00:34:57.920 be required to meaningfully invest in a community

00:35:01.560 where they want to build their infrastructure?

00:35:03.100 That's not socialism.

00:35:05.460 That's just common sense.

00:35:07.140 That's rational. 0.86

00:35:09.340 That's like, that's America first.

00:35:13.060 That's caring about American communities.

00:35:15.480 And if you're a town manager or a county bureaucrat,

00:35:19.220 you watch that video,

00:35:21.540 before you agree to let wind turbines

00:35:24.840 or solar panels or data centers especially

00:35:27.500 come to your town,

00:35:29.140 why shouldn't you get every cent you can

00:35:31.640 out of these companies

00:35:32.320 to build yourself a mechanics institute,

00:35:36.140 hire an award-winning architect to do it?

00:35:39.340 Why not?

00:35:40.900 Though most people don't realize it, America is richer today than it was a century ago,

00:35:46.160 so there's no reason they can't do that.

00:35:50.300 Somewhere at the top is somebody like Mary Barra or Scott Kirby.

00:35:54.780 Surely they can afford it.

00:35:57.080 Ten years ago, the corporate class was much more interested in social governance scores

00:36:01.340 and donating to the vast black hole of inner-city nonprofits.

00:36:06.820 And today, they're not even interested in that.

00:36:09.340 What we're seeing now from our AI overlords, including Sam Altman and people like him, is this idea that in the future, nobody will have a job.

00:36:18.560 And so instead, we'll all be completely dependent on big tech.

00:36:22.160 And some people are excited about this.

00:36:24.020 This is a representative post from somebody calling himself a futurist, for example.

00:36:28.640 And there's a lot of this on social media right now.

00:36:32.320 It says, quote, two years from now, you will not work and you will not worry about money.

00:36:39.340 you will get your cash payments from all the major AI labs.

00:36:43.840 Think of it like three to five companies giving you $1,000 check every week.

00:36:50.780 And this is the idea you hear a lot now.

00:36:52.940 So the AI companies in the near future, supposedly, this is the idea,

00:36:57.000 will give us all stipends and we will become dependents of Sam Altman.

00:37:04.380 This is supposed to be an optimistic vision of the future.

00:37:07.140 Actually, it's deeply horrifying

00:37:09.840 And it's not what we mean

00:37:12.440 At least it's not what I mean

00:37:13.920 When I say that these CEOs should be contributing

00:37:16.740 To their community and to their country

00:37:18.760 This sounds like a dystopian nightmare

00:37:21.900 I don't want to live off of handouts

00:37:24.300 From my big tech overlords

00:37:26.020 The fact that anyone sees that

00:37:27.820 As some heavenly vision of the future

00:37:29.740 Is extremely depressing

00:37:30.960 Living as serfs with our hands out

00:37:34.240 Going to big tech

00:37:35.760 can I have my stipend this week, please? Lord Sam, can you give me my stipend?

00:37:43.920 This is not the kind of a future we should be trying to build for ourselves and our children.

00:37:50.160 And there is another way. It involves providing the right incentives and giving people a clear

00:37:55.500 sense of the stakes that are involved, which is what Toyota did with those GM employees.

00:38:00.820 and if you do that support for socialism plummets you know we can't do anything to change the minds 0.99

00:38:07.600 of the Somalis and the other foreign scammers who have come here to plunder our treasury 1.00

00:38:11.360 all we can do with them or about them is deport them and we should but we can reverse the trend 1.00

00:38:17.840 we're seeing among native-born Americans who are now entertaining the single most destructive 1.00

00:38:23.500 ideology the West has ever seen in record numbers. We can take a cue from the guy who's 1.00

00:38:31.680 building flying cars and catching rockets in midair instead of the 85-year-old whiny socialist

00:38:38.180 from Vermont. We can return to the sense of genuine excitement for the future, which was

00:38:43.480 so dominant in this country in the middle of the 20th century when people were thrilled by

00:38:48.120 everything from moon landings to shopping malls.

00:38:52.060 That is objectively a much better place

00:38:54.340 for the United States to be.

00:38:56.880 And in the long run, it's also a much better outcome 0.97

00:38:59.200 for even the most useless CEOs, 0.94

00:39:02.140 the Scott Kirby's and Mary Barra's of the world. 0.95

00:39:05.820 Under their system,

00:39:07.780 you know, the system that they're advocating for,

00:39:09.420 that Kirby is advocating for,

00:39:13.620 the CEOs get sent to the gallows.

00:39:15.720 Under the other system

00:39:18.720 The CEOs invest a fraction

00:39:20.240 Of their company's vast wealth

00:39:21.520 To help create a country

00:39:22.860 With many more Elon Musks

00:39:25.780 And as few Scott Kirby's

00:39:28.460 And Mary Barra's as possible

00:39:30.400 That's the best way 1.00

00:39:33.320 To prevent a Bolshevik takeover 0.98

00:39:34.760 In this country 0.91

00:39:35.380 Voluntarily end

00:39:38.780 The comically absurd pay packages 1.00

00:39:40.740 And give Americans a stake

00:39:41.960 In the success of the American economy

00:39:45.720 Elon Musk has started this campaign. Now every CEO who wants their company to exist in 20 years

00:39:50.840 and doesn't want their children to live under Bolshevik rule for the next century should 0.94

00:39:56.700 follow suit. As it turns out, Elon Musk, America's innovator-in-chief, apparently understands that

00:40:03.800 this is what we urgently need, and we need the noblesse oblige to make a comeback.

00:40:09.580 That's an idea which has long since fallen out of favor, that again, the nobility that is the

00:40:14.520 rich and powerful, have a basic responsibility to act honorably and generously and to care about

00:40:20.100 and meaningfully invest in the future of their nation. It's not a government policy, not something

00:40:26.560 that can be achieved through taxation. It's just a basic expectation of honorable behavior.

00:40:33.340 An expectation that, of course, should fall on everybody of any income bracket in one form or

00:40:38.040 another. And the point is not that the richest Americans, the ones with an enormous amount of

00:40:42.200 equity in the largest companies on the planet should give handouts. They shouldn't. Instead,

00:40:48.260 they should actually invest in a meaningful way in the future of the country. Not because the

00:40:53.140 government forces them to do it, but because they actually care about the future of the country.

00:40:58.160 It's not like they need to be driven by pure virtue and charity to care. If the country has

00:41:03.100 no future, neither do the companies. So this is just a matter of rational, long-term planning.

00:41:10.560 and elon just announced his own plan uh to do exactly this watch

00:41:16.320 meanwhile elon musk vows a giveaway of one share of spacex to every child in the united states in

00:41:23.560 the social media post musk says this gift will be the very first of many to come this news comes a

00:41:28.680 day after ai giant anthropic committed five percent of its shares to a public benefit fund

00:41:34.360 live now to cbs news senior business and tech correspondent joe lynn kent okay so joe lynn

00:41:39.240 First of all, good to see you, my friend.

00:41:40.760 Second of all, what's the why, especially for Musk here?

00:41:44.480 Well, he was responding, essentially, to Anthropix, saying that they are going to have this public benefit fund.

00:41:49.400 He responds to the announcement on X, which, of course, he owns, and says,

00:41:53.660 wouldn't it be better to give money directly to the public?

00:41:57.440 And so he proposes this idea of giving shares of SpaceX to individual kids.

00:42:03.100 And if you do the math, it's basically 72, 73 million kids, people under the age of 18 in the United States of America.

00:42:11.460 Right now we have SpaceX stock at about, I'm just looking at the ticker here, it's about $148 a share.

00:42:18.900 So you do the math, and that's a pretty significant.

00:42:23.980 Now, as it stands today, a share of SpaceX isn't worth much, only around $150.

00:42:28.700 but if you give a child a share of SpaceX today, it'll almost certainly be worth much, much more

00:42:33.360 by the time he's 18 and certainly by the time he retires. By Musk's estimates, which are admittedly

00:42:38.540 optimistic, that share could be worth more than $7,000 within the next decade. And the moral of

00:42:44.320 the story is that it's very important for builders and creators like Elon to do what they do and get

00:42:50.520 rich doing it. That's how the system is supposed to work. You know, those are CEOs who took on

00:42:55.620 extraordinary risk, built massive corporations from the ground up. Elon just unveiled a flying

00:43:01.100 car, which we're supposed to be angry about. Bernie Sanders has never created a single job

00:43:06.200 in his life, never had an original thought in his life, never done anything remotely interesting or

00:43:12.540 inspiring, but he wants to destroy what Elon built because if people see Elon doing amazing

00:43:17.360 things, they might realize that the government is wasting their money and then the whole scam

00:43:20.660 falls apart. There are also corporate suits who are getting very rich and don't deserve to. In

00:43:27.760 the cases of the vast majority of established companies, CEO compensation is totally detached

00:43:33.100 from reality. There's no universe where Mary Barra is worth $48 million a year, which comes out to

00:43:39.900 around $184,000 per workday, which is nearly triple the annual salary of an American worker, 1.00

00:43:47.700 triple the average American salary in one day. It's obscene. And what makes it obscene is not

00:43:54.540 the amount. Elon Musk is worth astronomically more than her. Mary Barra is closer to being

00:44:02.000 below the poverty line than she is to being anywhere near Elon Musk's net worth. But again,

00:44:07.680 he's a builder. He's an innovator, a great man of history. Guys like him should be rich. They

00:44:13.120 should be rewarded. Barra is a talentless, non-achieving HR manager who floated her way 1.00

00:44:18.440 to the top on the wings of DEI. She doesn't inspire anyone. She does the opposite. And if 0.99

00:44:25.360 she's ever fired, everyone knows she'll get a massive payout, just like the CEO of every other

00:44:29.960 failed company. So the incentive structure doesn't make sense to most people because it's a ridiculous 0.92

00:44:35.640 system. And therefore, in increasing numbers, young Americans, not just foreigners, are 0.99

00:44:43.220 thinking that socialism is the answer, which it isn't. Now, that's not a rational conclusion.

00:44:50.020 It's not smart. It's a disaster for the country and the entire human race. Socialism is

00:44:57.280 one of the most evil systems ever devised by mankind. But that's what they're doing.

00:45:06.240 Now, Elon has earned his money because he's actually creating meaningful new products, including self-driving technology that people can use on a day-to-day basis.

00:45:15.120 No question that his net worth is earned, which, by the way, is not stored in some bank vault.

00:45:22.800 You know, it's not in his checking account.

00:45:24.920 His net worth comes from his stock in Tesla and SpaceX.

00:45:27.440 And if any American wants to share in that wealth and to see the same gains and losses that Elon sees, to a smaller degree, obviously, they can buy the stock as well.

00:45:40.340 You know, they're publicly traded. That's how it's supposed to work.

00:45:43.820 And ultimately, the goal is to create a lot more Elons and no more Mary Barras. 0.98

00:45:52.320 We need to be a country that facilitates and rewards builders and innovators again. 0.93

00:45:58.180 That is the best way to prevent the coming socialist revolution.

00:46:03.640 And in fact, it turns out it's the only way.

00:46:08.420 That'll do the show today.

00:46:09.180 Thanks for watching.

00:46:09.680 Thanks for listening.

00:46:10.400 Talk to you tomorrow.

00:46:11.760 Have a great day.

00:46:12.760 Godspeed.

00:46:27.440 Professor.

00:46:57.440 Get out of here! 0.91

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00:47:01.440 You will remember your duty.

00:47:03.440 This isn't heroism! 1.00

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The Matt Walsh Show - October 20, 2026

Ep. 1859 - Get Your Pitchforks. Woke CEOs Are Way Overpaid.

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