Are techs billion-dollar CEOs worth their pay?
Apple paid its chief executive, Tim Cook, $US1.4 billion ($1.8 billion) in total since 2007. Oracles chairman, Larry Ellison, racked up stock and cash valued at nearly $US1.9 billion over the same period. And Mark Zuckerberg has pulled in $US5.7 billion from Facebook since the company went public in 2012. These are among the billion-dollar men of the technology industry. The cumulative pay cheques of a half-dozen executives topped $US13.2 billion, according to a new analysis of the past 15 years. Those are years in which tech companies become powerful forces in the economy, our lives and world affairs. The mood about technology has soured more recently, but the tech bosses pay cheques mostly remained unscathed. Its hard to assess how much of Apples financial or stock performance can be attributed to Tim Cook. Credit:AP  The New York Times published an analysis of the most highly paid chief executives of Americas publicly traded companies in 2020. During the pandemic, the executives received some of the richest pay packages ever, my colleague Peter Eavis reported. To get a picture of what companies paid their bosses over a longer period of time, executive compensation consulting firm Equilar ranked the 10 executives with the most cumulative total pay, going as far back as 2006 when there was a change in corporate compensation disclosures. Tech bosses took six of those 10 spots, largely because of the value of stock that their companies gave them.