In a preliminary filing Friday with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Microsoft Corp. says it raised CEO Steve Ballmer’s salary by 4% in fiscal 2009 even as the software maker’s profit plummeted 17%.
Ballmer’s 2009 base salary rose to US$665,883 from $640,833.
Microsoft didn’t disclose Ballmer’s bonus for fiscal 2009, but last year it was $700,000.
MacDailyNews Take: According to Forbes, Ballmer has a net worth of $11 billion in 2009, or $7.6 billion more than Steve Jobs, which is considered by leading experts to be the ultimate proof that this sonuvabitchin’ life just ain’t fair.
And, oh yeah, BTW: Microsoft axes 5,000 jobs in first-ever companywide firings as revenue, profits miss expectations – January 22, 2009
And, now, the toast: May Steve Ballmer remain Microsoft CEO for as long as it takes!
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Brawndo Drinker” for the heads up.]
Ah heck, I think we should double Job’s salary to $2!
What a slap to the face of all those MS employees who were layed off. As if Ballmer needed a 4% raise. I’m sure he’s worth a few hundred mill in stock alone.
I remember when bonuses were the reward for a job extremely well done, not just expected and given as part of one’s income. This seems perverse to me.
At this rate, Apple should be paying his bonus, not M$! LOL!
Here’s a shining example of the problems in corporate America today. It used to be you earned your pay, now it just seems you’re entitled to it.
And may the board keep paying him for as long as it takes!
I think they should raise his pay to $60 million and give him a $6 million bonus. That would cause layoffs, and the employees would be able to find dignified work, such as selling flowers at the airport. It would also force Microsoft to focus on its core business of hype and get out of our faces.
May he remain Microsoft’s CEO for as long as it takes.
I say we all donate to the cause and keep him employed at m$. He is the best thing that ever happened to promote Apple’s growth other than Steve Jobs.
US$665,883? That’s just sick.
Ever wonder how many times that ugly tongue has been up Bill Gates’ toot-hole?
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As MS nosedives and Apple continues the rising star, Ballmer is doing a great job (from my perspective)
Give him another raise, and short sell MS stock.
At least Microsoft is still managing to make a profit. If the companying were losing money and he’s still getting a raise, that would be irresponsible.
Maybe he should go to work for Goldman Sachs? Blankfein (CEO) pulled in a cool $43 million (2008).
They wanted it to be rounded to $ 666 k.
just saw this on the net, Balmer is going to be the keynote speaker at an efficiency event put on my MS. Only in bizarro world would this be possible.
http://www.microsoft.com/business/thenewefficiency/keynote/en/us/
Jeebus, Sir Gill, that was friggin’ disgusting, because it led me to wonder how many times Bill had done it the other way ’round, too. I’m going to go have to clean the little bit of vomit out of my mouth now.
MrMcLargeHuge, I agree. And yet, some would have us believe that we should simply trust corporate America to do the right thing all the time, every time, because it will be in the best interest of the company and the consumers and, of paramount importance, the shareholders. Yeah. Right on.
So that’s how you make those outrageous salaries. Get plastic surgery so your face looks like your ass, and eat flies with your tongue after you squash them by smacking your hands together, which I assume he’s trying to do in the picture.
Ballmer and his raise represent everything that has gone amok in corporate America. Salary and bonuses are no longer tied to performance; they are tied to your relationship with the board and how well they are taken care of.
Yes!! This is an indication that MS wants Balmer to stay as CEO. May he be MS’s CEO for as long as he shall live.
considering grown men run around in cute hats hitting little balls with sticks make millions a year playing a sports game… I’m really surprised he makes less the a mil a year…
He totally deserves this raise, simply for having the self control this year to not do the monkey dance again. This raise + all the replacement chairs are totally worth it if he never does it again.
@ aka Christian,
Sorry, I agree that my comment was in bad taste.
The raise seems like a token gesture. Like maybe 4% was the average raise for all employees. $25,000 is a lot for me, but for Balmer, it was probably an insult. The real “gesture” is the bonus; his “bonus” last year was more than is base salary! Now that’s some bonus…
I think he gets a fiver for each employee canned.
@ aka Christian,
Uh, I also apologize for that last one.
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@ At least Microsoft is profitable still
MS is profitable only in areas where they were able to establish or leverage illegal monopolies. *Every* other business they have loses money. (Look at their 10ks for the past decade – there’s a reason their stock has flatlined for 10 years!) They’re *still* losing on XBoxes claiming they’re “doing a Gillette” and profiting from the sale of “razor blades.”
LYNCH HIM!!!!!!!!
OBallmer will stop all this profiteering in the new USSA.
jeez.. he owns a ton of Company stock, his ‘raise’ will go unnoticed as does his actual ‘salary’….
*shakes head
Not much of a raise actually. Of course, that may have saved most (or part) of someone’s job. But, as CEO salaries go, it seems pretty token to me. Maybe it was actually a slap in the face by the Board. Or maybe they really think he’s worth that much more. Anyway, with all that extra money, maybe he can finally afford that Mac he’s always secretly wanted.
You decide
His salary is obviously not based on performance. I hope that at least is bonus is (which should be $0 in 2009). I don’t know, though. You’d have to pay me a lot of money to take over Ballmer’s spot at Microsoft. They have so many problems I wouldn’t want them.
Being but a lowly college student, I find it frustrating that his raise is more than the combined income of my two jobs…
This is nothing. Every so called investbanker makes much more than that.
But they don’t have his stock holdings!
Sir Gill – Bad taste indeed. It wasn’t even tongue in cheek.
Back in the 80s / 90s, the poor had their entitlements taken away. Apparently it was because corporate leaders wanted to have entitlements instead.
I would like to see realistic company guidance (like Apple does), moderate growth expectations and bonuses paid on long-term performance. Reward executives for loyalty and don’t encourage them to make short term manipulations in order to give them ridiculous amounts of money.
Is this REALLY anything new? The trend now is a CEO gets the big bucks whether or not the company makes a profit. Seems pay based on results have long went the way of the dodo bird. Now all pay is based on how skilfully your lawyer can get you a good contract like a sport athlete.
bugger wrote:
“considering grown men run around in cute hats hitting little balls with sticks make millions a year playing a sports game… I’m really surprised he makes less the a mil a year…”
A good point. Even tho’ Ballmer is a horrible CEO and is killing MS (not that I have a problem with that or anything), he’s still got useful skills. If he weren’t the CEO of MS (and he didn’t have 7 Bil in the bank), I’d hire him onto my sales force. I bet he’s pretty damn good at it. Or he could run my treasury, or HR department, I’d bet. His only problem is that nobody is in charge of him – he’s the type who needs a boss, or he gets into stupid crap like trying to buy Yahoo or making Zunes. But put somebody in charge of him, and I’d bet he could run any part of a company, and probably very well.
Ballplayers are just useless. And the guys who sit around and analyze the games – grown men, wearing suits, having serious discussions about… a ballgame.
I just don’t get it, I guess.
1) This is NOT an example of how corporate America has gone wrong. This is not a right or wrong decision by the board. It is a decision that they have made and the stockholders and the marketplace will ultimately judge. I’m the last guy in the world to defend Ballmer, but at the same time, if the stockholders decide to give him an increase, then let him have it. Like the Grim Reaper, the marketplace isn’t necessarilly swift in dealing with incompetence, but there is no escape from it either.
2) Ballmer continues his streak as the world’s luckiest college roommate.
Luckiest. Dorm. Room. Allocation. Ever.
@Jim – TIV
Maybe he’s giving a lecture on the efficiency of demolishing an IHOP.
Well, now we know why they aced all of those jobs.
Axed
heres the thing ron, if what nuts like you and glen beck bitched about where true, we would have already shot you. stfu and crawl back in your ultra right wing hole, the adults are talking about the salary of a tard….
Shouldn’t he have a forked toungue?
-This is because HDZune is sold out! Ballmer deserves it!
– Oh gosh, no! HDZune 16Gb is only sold out because they did half a dozen of these… And they found half a dozen ignorants who believed they where buying a new sort of iPod!
-Damn! These guys bought a collector without knowing?
-Yes, but they can’t count of getting much monney trying reselling it!
How much money is enough money. Capitalism, the pursuit of individual greed.
“@ aka Christian,
Uh, I also apologize for that last one.”
Doesn’t sound very ‘Christian’ to me.
CEO’s have become grossly overpaid. I’m sure this move by Microsoft will be great for employee morale. Makes me think of when HP cut employee salaries by 5-20% earlier this year and CEO Mark Hurd bragged about taking a 20% pay cut off his base salary. It was nice of him to make that gesture, but the vast majority of his yearly income comes from bonuses and stock options, so it was like ordering everyone in the company shaved bald while he took a tiny little trim off the top.
@ ron,
I’m not gettin’ your drift, bud.
It time the question is asked….
Just who or what did Steve Ballmer find in the executive restroom/bedroom that warrants keeping this jackass in office?
This childish man is driving Microsoft into a hole the likes of which has never been seen before and yet the boards just keep rewarding him for his bad practices.
I for one has long ago exchanged any Microsoft stock that I may have had for Apple stock and have been well rewarded for doing so!
But is it not now the time for the rest of the stock holders to either dump Steve Ballmer or dump there shares in Microsoft’s?
Better yet, is it not time for the board to return any remaining profits to the stockholders themselves?
A mass rejection of Steve Ballmer by stockholders seems the only way to trump any insider information that Steve Ballmer might have hidden away in his personal portfolio.
Keeping Steve Ballmer in place after Steve Gate retired had to be the worst move that Gates ever made!
Whoda thunk that a career felcher could ever make in the upper 6 figures. How much does that pay by the gulp?
Monkeyboy keeps raping micro$haft and we luv him for it.
MW. brown! how zune can it get?
we should all kick in a few bucks and keep ballmer at the helm. He’s doing a wonderful job killing off microsh*t and that deserves a nice bonus I believe. Long may it last! Well not too long.
I’ll personally pay Ballmer $10 out of my own pocket to keep him in charge of Micro$oft.
Anything to keep him as CEO, for as long as it takes (which won’t be long, believe me).
Man, where can I get a job that pays me more and more for the dumber my decisions are, rewards me for fostering poor copies of other’s innovations, and allows unlimited control over a company that drops like a stone in it’s market growth?
Hope Ballmer retires so I can apply. I can do all that from sitting on a Yacht out in some ocean. Though there would be some stress: I’d have to hold myself back from thinking any creative thoughts, and block out all intelligent reasoning and statistics. But I’ll do my best.
And I might need a tongue transplant from Kiss’ guitarist Gene Simmons. I’ll need to look credible as Ballmer’s successor for the publicity photo on MDN news page.
The The Board had no choice but to give Ballmer a raise as he’s doing a fine job at coping Apple. So, the company lost some sales and they are tossing money down the crapper faster then a 2 year tosses a fit. Ballmer is doing a fine job! If the board of directors had not given him a raise it would have been a vote of no confidence in the job he was doing and Microsoft shares would have tanked straight away. If Microsoft keeps loosing ground on profits and keeps having pressures placed on it’s profit margin the board can keep the biggest investors at bay by continuing to show support for Ballmer by giving him a raise and a fat bonus each year this will hold off the biggest investors for a few more years (that is the MSFT board of director’s hope anyway) while the board searches for options or prays that Ballmer gets lucky or something. You can only dump money down blackholes for so long before the investors get nervous (I think MSFT has poured too much of the company’s profits down the drain for investors and I think they are already nervous with Microsoft’s first ever lay-offs, planning on spending Billions on retail stores that are never projected to earn a profit, making a deal with with Yahoo that insures that Microsoft makes no money on search advertising, the Zune skidding to just continued market share losses and the Xbox 360 red ring of death failures continuing and now estimated at over 59.87% of all units will experience the issue and most units will have the issue even after being remanufactured, even the newest Xbox 360 will have the issue at a rate of over 40%) will and the Ballmer raise has pushed some of them too far. Those pushed to far will start moving their money out of the company. It will take just a few of the long time big institutional investors to start pulling out to spark a big sell off. Once the sell off starts I think it will tank the Microsoft share price down to the less then $5.00 price and it could slide all the way to less then a $1.00. Any such slide in Microsoft stock price would of course wipe out huge fortunes for those that are holding and don’t get out of MSFT stock quickly.
The strategy that a smart investors with a large stake in MSFT will adopt today is over the next few months or less they will start thinning their MSFT holdings with a plan of being de-invested in MSFT in less 3 to 4 months. Larger investors would need to be much more aggressive because waiting to get out will only end up damaging more then a reputation it will damage the financial fortunes as well.
Considering that over the years owning MSFT has been like watching paint dry. MSFT it’s not a growth stock it’s been just a safe neutered place to hold the investors money. But, in looking at the companies direction and their current path the wheels are about to fall off and the only place the stock is headed is down. The only question is how far, to less then $5.00 or less then a $1.00.