During the first quarter of 2023, PG&E earned $623 million, an 18.2% jump in profits from the $527 million the company tallied during the same quarter in 2022, PG&E said Thursday in a quarterly report filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
LOL, as if $1M is real money. Not a tenth of a drop in the bucket. But let’s do the math!
Pretty outrageous sounding, even given most of that was “one time” rewards. Whatever.
$.003 paid to the CEO on every dollar in profit.
Executive pay ain’t the problem. Hint: It never is the problem, but it makes for a convenient point for the public to direct their ire.
IDGAF what they pay the suits, I want to know how a utility made $17B in profit.
It might not be the problem, but it’s still a problem.
So you think we should spend our political capital fighting CEO pay when cutting it to zero will have zero effect?
I see this notion a lot on social media, the idea that we can fight on every front. We cannot. Political capital is money, or battlefield assets, if you will. You only have $X to spread around, punch where it counts.
It doesn’t matter how righteous your cause. For anything one wishes to accomplish, there’s power and money that does not wish that thing accomplished.
The young say, “We can fight everything, everywhere, all at once! We have energy and morality on our side!”
The old say, “Ain’t got the energy. Kick 'em in the fork.”
More of this black and white thinking as though multiple things can’t be tackled at the same time or consecutively. 🙄 Way too common here. You don’t have to ignore or deny one problem just because there are bigger problems.
Your response is exactly what I’m trying to address.
Spend energy fighting where it counts.
Yes, there’s an infinite amount of energy to be spent in social media commentary, not so much IRL.
And your response is exactly what I’m trying to address. Too many people take a black and white this or that approach. Again, you don’t have to ignore or deny one problem in order to focus on a bigger one.
That’s about $425 per resident of California, FWIW.
Net income, after expenses are completely deducted, was substantially less - $406,000. About $10 per resident of California.
If you really do want to know what the money comes from and is spent on, I’m pretty sure it’ll be in the financial reports in much more detail.
Source: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/PCG/pacific-gas-electric/net-income
You have read these charts wrong. The 17B figure is 12-month trailing gross profit. You are referencing quarterly net income (and you’ve also made a typo, saying 406 thousand instead of 406 million). If you want to compare the “per resident” calculation (which I don’t even see the point of), make your units match. Trailing 12-month net income is 1.944B, so more like $50 per person.
Now to make the “per resident” metric actually have any meaning:
First, if we’re talking yearly profit skimming off of a utility, our goal is to estimate overcharges per billing address. Census data reports about 38.9 million residents and an average family size of 2.92 - but that’s not enough, because PG&E doesn’t serve the entire state. They serve about two thirds of the state - taking this into account, a very rough estimate (because population isn’t evenly spread across a state) is that they service 8.7 million households. Thankfully for us, they directly report how many households they serve, and the actual number is about 5.2 million.
$374. The average yearly bill for a PG&E customer is $374 pure profit for the company. Now that’s a more useful metric.
Oh, and that’s assuming none of their operating expenses are inflated - which they likely are. So that’s a lower bound for how much they’re ripping off each household.