“One group seems to have totally escaped the hard economic times of the last three years: chief executive officers of major U.S. companies. Would you believe average annual pay of $12 million a year? A review of total pay from 2000 through 2002 for 243 CEOs running companies with 2002 revenue of $5 billion or more also shows that total pay ranged from a low of $336,000 a year received by Berkshire Hathaway Inc.’s Warren Buffett to $219 million a year for Steve Jobs of Apple Computer Inc.,” reports Graef Crystal for Bloomberg.
“Besides having the group’s highest three-year average annual pay, Jobs also wins my Most-Ludicrous-Pay-Package trophy, which isn’t awarded every year. When Jobs returned to Apple in August 1997 to run the company he co-founded, he started out with a pay package of precisely one element — $1 a year in salary. Then, in a stunning display of love gone out of control, Jobs’ board in 2000 gave him title to a free Gulfstream 5 jet for his personal use and also history’s most valuable stock option grant, one covering 20 million shares, equal to about 6 percent of all outstanding shares. The jet, including reimbursing Jobs for all of his taxes on the gift, as well as the taxes on the taxes on the taxes, set back the shareholders $84 million. In fiscal 2002, after it became clear his 20 million option shares weren’t likely to rise out of the muck of San Francisco Bay, Jobs’s board gave him options on another 7.5 million shares. In March 2003, after the end of my study period, Jobs gave up the ghost entirely on stock options. He turned in his 27.5 million option shares for a grant of five million free shares worth $74.6 million,” Crystal reports.
Full article and “Top 15 Overpaid and Underpaid US CEOs” here.
MacDailyNews: Worth every penny. Without Jobs there would not be an Apple Computer, Inc. today; instead there is a profitable and innovative Apple in the midst of the toughest personal computer business climate the industry has ever seen.
