Catwho wrote:
What awesome thing did he do to justify that kind of paycheck? I've never even heard of that company.
Nothing. You're seeing a statistical mirage is all. The company actually bought him out of a more expensive long term contract, and paid him a one time $60m lump sum this last year. He wouldn't normally even be on the top 100 list otherwise.
Most of the pay increases are market based (projected market values even). Here's a
page that explains things somewhat Quote:
Here's a breakdown of 2013 pay compared with 2012 pay. Because the AP looks at median numbers, rather than averages, the components of CEO pay do not add up to the total.
—Base salary: $1.1 million, up 4.8 percent
—Bonus: $1.9 million, up 12.6 percent
—Perks: $164,951, up 2.8 percent
—Stock awards: $4.5 million, up 17.3 percent
—Option awards $1.25 million, down 4.2 percent
—Total: $10.5 million, up 8.8 percent
When business does well, CEO pay will tend to reflect that more than worker pay. The statistical problem with these sorts of calculation is that they're always subject to bias. Since we're only looking at the "top CEOs" at the most successful companies, we're always going to see only those who are receiving large bonuses and stock grants (cause those are always going to scale to business performance). Trim that down to just the top 50 and you're basically playing a statistics game.
Over time, as the largest companies get actually larger (both in number of employees and number of countries/locations they operate in), it's natural that CEO pay will increase relative to the average worker pay. Doubly so when we're restricting our list to just the largest companies. As I point out every single time someone brings this up, the largest 50 companies are massively larger today than the largest 50 companies were 50 years ago (or whatever random time point in the past someone tries to use as a comparison). What's missing in these sorts of calculations are all of the smaller companies out there with much more modest pay for their top executives. They never make the lists, so no one thinks about them. But because of that, there's this perception of this huge gulf between "us and them", when in reality it's a much more smooth slope.
