The American public’s apathy reached a new low – or should I say high – this week with news that Meta just settled a landmark child-safety case with a fine of up to $18 billion paid over the next decade, with annual payments equal to less than 1% of its 2025 revenue. I’d call that a wrist slap given the gravity of the allegations.
State prosecutors charged Meta with deploying predatory, dopamine-driven design features to hook developing minds, systematically violating federal child privacy laws, and concealing internal studies that showed its algorithms actively worsened depression, eating disorders, and suicidal thoughts among teens. The parent of Facebook and Instagram feared the lawsuit could have reached $1.4 trillion, which is closer to the punishment I’d view as appropriate, along with some jail time for Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s founder and weasel-in-chief.
Despite the documented harm inflicted on children and an extensive laundry list of past scandals, Meta suffered zero reputational damage on Wall Street. The stock rose, proving once again that the financial markets don’t factor morality into their valuation models.
That same moral indifference was evident in the near-total media blackout surrounding the Institute for Policy Studies’ “Executive Excess 2026” report. The 32nd annual study lays bare how the S&P 500’s “Low-Wage 100” hollowed out their workforces while stuffing executive pockets: between 2019 and 2025, average CEO pay at these 100 firms surged 41.4% to $17.5 million—growing at double the rate of their median workers’ wages, which crept up just 20.7% to $36,571.
With cumulative U.S. inflation hitting 25.9% over the same stretch, the math is unambiguous: while boardrooms lavished themselves with inflation-crushing windfalls, the real purchasing power of frontline workers went backward.
That American CEOs enjoy an embarrassment of riches while their employees’ living standards erode is no longer breaking news. What stopped me cold was discovering IBM among the report’s “Low-Wage 100.” CEO Arvind Krishna hauled in the largest compensation package in the Low-Wage 100 at $38.0 million, or 765 times the company’s median pay of $49,630.
How did Big Blue—once the gold standard of American corporate prestige and engineering excellence—morph into a statistical peer of Walmart, Dollar General, and fast-food chains?
A big part of the credit—or blame, depending on your view of globalization—goes to Virginia “Ginni” Rometty. While her predecessor, Sam Palmisano, laid the initial groundwork, Rometty aggressively championed the flight of jobs to India—first as head of IBM’s global services division and then as CEO from 2012 to 2020. By 2017, the New York Times reported that IBM employed about 130,000 people in India—roughly one-third of its global workforce and more than in any other country, including the United States.
The shift to India was accompanied by a ruthless domestic purge under Rometty’s watch. ProPublica reported in March 2018 that about 60% of U.S. employees ousted by IBM in the previous five years were age 40 or over, the group protected by federal age-bias laws. In some instances, IBM earmarked money saved by the departures to bring in what it called “early professional hires” to, in the words of one internal company document, “correct seniority mix.”
ProPublica reported that IBM regularly denied older workers information the law says they’re entitled to in order to decide whether they’ve been victims of age bias and used point systems and other methods to push out older workers, even when the company rated them high performers.
The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 2020 issued a sweeping decision concluding that IBM engaged in systematic age discrimination between 2013 and 2018, when it shed thousands of older workers in the United States.
Rometty wasn’t shy about making promises. “I would say in five years, there’s no doubt in my mind that cognitive AI will impact every decision made from healthcare to education to financial services,” she predicted in 2016. Despite a relentless media blitz that included Super Bowl commercials, glowing magazine profiles, and keynote addresses, the technology never generated meaningful software revenue.
By the late 2010s, following high-profile clinical collapses—such as the canceled $62 million oncology initiative at MD Anderson—and alarming reports of erratic, unsafe treatment recommendations, Watson’s credibility was shot. Rometty’s successor, Arvind Krishna, eventually broke up the unit and sold IBM’s Watson Health assets at fire-sale prices for a fraction of what the company had poured into them.
Where Rometty did find acclaim was on the corporate diversity circuit. She championed “skills-based” hiring—dubbed “New Collar” jobs—to recruit talent without traditional four-year degrees, earning IBM its fourth Catalyst Award in 2018 for advancing women and diversity. But that public relations veneer masked a darker corporate reality: while the Armonk, NY-based company collected industry accolades for inclusive hiring, it was methodically purging tens of thousands of experienced American engineers over the age of 40.
The operational decline showed up everywhere. IBM endured 22 consecutive quarters of falling revenue during Rometty’s tenure. Annual revenue tumbled from roughly $104 billion in 2012, when she took the helm, to around $77 billion by the time she stepped down—a decline driven only in part by divestitures.
Over her eight-year reign, IBM squandered roughly $55 billion repurchasing its own stock—nearly double what the company spent on actual capital expenditures. Yet despite this massive artificial bid, IBM shares were a notorious market laggard, shedding roughly a quarter of their value while the broader S&P 500 more than doubled.
Shareholders were left holding the bag, but the executive suite took no such haircut: Rometty walked away with more than $157 million in total compensation for her eight years of value destruction.
IBM’s fall from grace—and its quiet transformation into an enterprise anchored in India—was once unimaginable. The company was so thoroughly revered that corporate lore coined an ironclad rule of IT procurement: “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.” That Big Blue now sits in the S&P 500’s “Low-Wage 100” marks the ultimate institutional humiliation.
IBM’s decline isn’t merely the story of one iconic American company. General Electric and Boeing immediately come to mind.
So what became of Virginia Rometty? Given her systematic destruction of an iconic American institution, one might expect her to be persona non grata in boardrooms across the country—shunned by corporate leaders terrified of reputational contagion.
Think again. America’s corporate elite rarely exiles its own. Rometty sits comfortably as a director of JPMorgan Chase, alongside Mellody Hobson, under whose board leadership Starbucks spiraled into operational turmoil.
Getting elevated to CEO in America is like checking into the Hotel California: no matter how much value you destroy, membership in the club is for life.