They'll just write bigger golden parachutes into their contacts to offset the risk. That or suddenly everyone is an EVP and the C levels all are just paid fall guys.

But 25% revenue might work.

Well add a 3 strikes law [0], after all corporations are supposed to be person, from a legal standpoint.

3 strikes, and the company is dissolved. In fact, this should definitely happen for US credit rating companies which keep on leaking data.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-strikes_law

This is an EXCELLENT proposal. They would fight just as hard to ensure they never receive the second strike to avoid the forever-doom that will loom over investors.

I think a 3 strike against the CxO as a person will be more effective.

1st strike blocks you from working as CxO for 5 years, 2nd strike for 10 years, 3rd strike is forever.

Right now too many bad CxO jump from one ship to the next again and again.

When a CxO gets their 2nd or 3rd company broken up they'll find it very hard to find a ship willing to let them on board.

If you let the company get away with crimes over and over and only punish a CxO the company will simply hire a guy to take the fall for them. There's an endless number of people working minimum wage who would happily take a CxO title and salary for years knowing full well that there's a chance they might get fired eventually.

#1: If a guy breakes the rules so much he gets a 3rd strike, I think it is perfectly reasonable he should never have a CxO job again. It is too easy getting away with serial white-collar crimes.

#2: It is not the company to decide who to take the fall. It is the court/judge.

Then you retitle yourself to EVP during the timeout.

3 strike laws usually only apply to violent felonies. You don't go to jail for life after getting 3 speeding tickets.

I'd be down with this, but we need to decide which kinds of violations are speeding tickets and which are serious felonies.

Assigning blame to the CxOs can be tricky. In this case the actual violations were from 2020, well before the EU even began its investigation, and some of the C-suite staff has changed.

Should it be the current C-suite that’s fired or the ones in charge when the violation occurred? Or maybe the ones in charge when the original policy at TikTok was created? Or what if the current C-suite was in charge, briefly, for the violating period but they’re also they ones that changed things to be in compliance before the investigation began, should they still be fired?

The diffuse responsibility makes this stuff tricky to implement.

Make such larges fines you end up with even fewer companies and the European Union gets even poorer, people keep wondering why their standards of living keep getting worse and GDP hasn't increased in over a decade. There's a reason European companies have such low tech salaries; even places like Singapore, Shanghai and the gulf countries have higher average tech salaries now than e.g. France or Germany.