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Apple CEO Steve Jobs tops list of highest paid Bay Area executives

Tuesday, December 28, 2004 · 5:11 pm · 11 Comments

Steve Jobs, co-founder and CEO of Apple Computer Inc., was the highest-paid executive in the San Francisco Bay area in 2003, according to a new study,” The Associated Press reports. “Jobs received a salary of only $1 in 2003, but he traded in almost all of his stock options for $74.8 million in restricted stock, according to an analysis of 400 publicly traded companies in the Bay Area by San Mateo-based Equilar, which tracks executive compensation.”

“Other Bay Area CEOs in the top five included John Chambers of Cisco Systems Inc. ($47.7 million), Meg Whitman of eBay Inc. ($42.6 million), Stephen Bennett of Intuit ($29.9 million ) and Craig Conway, formerly of PeopleSoft Inc. ($26.9 million),” AP reports. “The list of best-paid executives for 2004 is still not available because most companies will not report compensation information until next year.”

Full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: Jobs is worth every penny and more.

Related MacDailyNews articles:
Bloomberg columnist: Steve Jobs cost himself about $371 million with ‘bad move’ in Apple stock – November 24, 2004
Jobs tops highest-paid US CEO list; $219 million a year – August 13, 2003
Report shows Steve Jobs highest paid CEO – September 25, 2002

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Comment Feed

11 Comments

Ed

Tuesday, December 28, 2004 - 6:29 pm · Reply

Amen MDN! Well said
Benn

Tuesday, December 28, 2004 - 7:09 pm · Reply

Nobody should be paid that sort of money – there are too many millions with nothing at all who die because of their poverty.

A small minority of the population own nearly all the wealth – that is wrong.
fandango

Tuesday, December 28, 2004 - 7:11 pm · Reply

Ditto.

Had it not been for Jobs coming back to Apple to straighten out its problems, it would have been shut down already.

I wouldn’t give a crap if he were paid a billion dollars. He’s proved that he’s worth it.
Mac User

Tuesday, December 28, 2004 - 7:30 pm · Reply

I’m with Ed & fandango that Jobs earned every penny, though I hope he gives a reasonable amount to charity.

Benn, you’re simply wrong that the reason millions die from poverty has even the slightest connection to what Jobs earns. The reason millions die in such places as sub-Saharan African is because of bad government, especially government that doesn’t protect the average citizen’s physical safety or individual economic rights (i.e., property, contracts, etc.). In countries that get these things right, and don’t have too much corruption, CEO’s may make a lot of money but most people are secure and have a decent standard of living.
nsapap

Tuesday, December 28, 2004 - 8:20 pm · Reply

Well said, Mac User. Benn, don’t look very far — what about the salaries that professional athletes command — nobody seems to be too concerned about them!

Jobs, Bill Gates, and others of the “ultra-rich” give billions to charity. Woz and Steve Jobs started with nothing and made something of it — more power to them!

We’re all different, with different abilities and skills. Anyone with the right combination of intelligence, strong work-ethic, and of course, some luck, has the opportunity to make something of themselves. Too many people expect something for nothing like they’re “entitled” to it — in Steve Jobs’ case, he deserves everything he’s accomplished for himself and his family.
I HATE DELL

Tuesday, December 28, 2004 - 8:50 pm · Reply

People remember now, We the people pick the path we lead. So if you want to have millions that you or like to go out drinking and partying that your path.If you sit on your butt all day than that you.Remember you make your own path in life.So Steve jobs makes only one dollar for the year that him, but he not greeted like Bill Gates who billions on salary and stock. So you want something bad enough like money you go after it.
Frank

Tuesday, December 28, 2004 - 8:57 pm · Reply

Benn, take a dip you fool. If Jobs hadn’t pulled it off, there would be more ex-Apple employees down there in your poverty pool
Blue Horse

Tuesday, December 28, 2004 - 10:34 pm · Reply

Bud to Gordon Gecko:

“How many yachts do you need to ski behind”
king_alvarez

Wednesday, December 29, 2004 - 1:07 am · Reply

I agree that Jobs is worth every penny he’s been given, but only becauase he has actually contributed something positive to society, and thus to mankind in general. However, at the same time I agree with Benn that it is too bad that a small population controls most of the wealth, and thus most of the power. And while some of the wealthy have earned their money while contributing something useful to society, it seems that the majority have done so at the expense of others.

If something is deemed hazardous to health here in the States, a company will go and sell the product to a foreign country that doesn’t have the same regulations. Or a company will move its factory to a country that doesn’t have as strict of environmental regulations. Or they will bribe the FDA to approve an unsafe product so that they can make millions of dollars…the list goes on and on. Not only are they taking advantage of the situation of others, but they are profiting from it. And their total disregard for the earth is coming at the expense of our children who will have to either live in an unfit world or pay to fix it. So there may be no connection between Steve Jobs and the millions living in poverty (Mac User), there are many companies and executives that are affecting millions, perhaps billions, of lives around the world now and in the future.

These companies and executives may not be the sole reason why billions are living in poverty, but do they deserve to be paid billions of dollars? Steve Jobs may be one of the few whose goal is to make something that will truly benefit mankind, regardless of how much money he will get. So to you Steve Jobs, congratulations on creating a better world. You deserve a truly just compensation. To all of those that profit at the expense of others, it is a shame that many of us living in this capitalist society look up to you the image of a successful individual.
Kevin

Wednesday, December 29, 2004 - 2:51 am · Reply

Before you all start harping on Steve Jobs, remember that he doesn’t decide whether or not the company gives him those stock options that he traded in.
shadowself

Wednesday, December 29, 2004 - 12:47 pm · Reply

No one should ever count options the way these reporters do.

The way they tell it…
If I get options for 100 million shares in some company at a strike price (the price I have to pay to convert the options into real stock) $0.99 a share and then I turn around and sell them for $1.00 a share then I just made $100 million dollars. I sold the stock for $100 million and thus I must have “made” $100 million according to 99.999% of these reporters. In reality, I had a net profit of $1 million. I paid $99 million for the stock and sold it for $100 million.

This was most clearly pointed out when years ago Jobs was granted a HUGE chunk of stock options several years ago. Many reporters were saying Jobs was getting paid over $1 billion in stock options. Even Amelio came out and made statements about how extreme Job’s compensation was. (Amelio’s “golden parachute” had been estimate at over $400 million, and Amelio was trying to get people to think his “golden parachute” was not that egregious.) The reality was that the strike price on those options was more than the value of the stock at that time. It would have cost Jobs money to exercise the options. He would have LOST money if he sold the stock. Yet reporters were looking at the just the then current value of the stock and the number of stock shares Jobs had options for and NOT looking at how much it would have cost Jobs to buy the stock.

Thus the “over $1 billion” in stock options were completely worthless. Jobs even offered to sell 100% of those options to one reporter (one of the most vocal at the time) for $1.00. The reporter never took Jobs up on the offer. He knew what was really going on — the stock options were worthless — but just wanted to keep writing the lie that Jobs was getting “over $1 billion” in compensation.

If anyone wants to figure out exactly how much Jobs makes it will take a LOT of research into what the strike prices of each allotment actually was and what the sale price actually was.

The bottom line is that 99.99999% of these reports on senior management making tens or hundreds of millions on their stock sales are purely fantacy. The reporters don’t do the math and just want a big headline.