Mark Zuckerberg highest paid CEO in 2012: 10 things you need to know

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was the highest paid CEO in 2012 with a corporate compensation package worth more than $2.278 billion, according to a survey by corporate governance firm GMI Ratings.

[caption id=“attachment_695740” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  AFP[/caption]

GMI’s rankings include compensation from stock options sales/proceeds, which actually make up a large part of the top ten CEO’s 2012 salaries. GMI’s analysis identified two CEOs that earned more than $1 billion in a single year, as well as the first time all ten CEOs earned at least $100 million.

Here are the key findings of the survey:

1. Zuckerberg earned a salary of $503,000 and bonus of $266,000. But the jaw-dropping figure was stock options worth some $2.27 billion!

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2. Zuckerberg exercised 60 million stock options, granted in 2005 and fully vested by 2010, at a strike price of just 6 cents. Immediately after Facebook’s IPO in May 2012, he liquidated more than $1 billion worth of shares. He also had perquisites totaling $1.2 million, including personal use of company aircraft and security costs. Furthermore, as Mark Zuckerberg showed when he sold $1 billion worth of stock at Facebook’s IPO, these paper profits can quickly be converted into cash and taken to the bank.So basically,Zuckerberg’s compensation was mostly related to income tied to Facebook’s IPO and comprised almost entirely of stock option profits.

3 .This was the first time in the survey’s 11-year history that two CEOs earned more than $1 billion in a single year. The other was Richard D. Kinder, of Kinder Morgan

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4. Others on the list likeApple boss Tim Cook, who made $143.8 million and Liberty Media Corp’s Gregory Maffei, who made $254.8 million, don’t even come close to Zuckerberg’s payout.

5. The third-highest paid CEO was Sirius XM Radio’s Mel Karmazin at $255 million, followed by Liberty Media’s Gregory Maffei ($254 million) and Apple’s Tim Cook ($143 million).

6. The others in the top 10 list were Dick’s Sporting Goods’s CEO Edward Stack, who is paid $142 million, Starbucks’ Howard Schultz ($117 million), Salesforce’s Marc Benioff ($109 million) and Verisk Analytics’ Frank Coyne ($100 million).

7.The list of 10 highest paid CEOs is also by far the highest total value of any annual top 10 list, totaling about $4.7 billion; it is also the first time each member of the top 10 earned $100 million or more.

8. Median CEO pay increased 8.47%, marking the third straight year of boosts in salarywhile median pay for CEOs at S&P 500 companies increased 19.65%. Compensation increases were far more prominent at larger companies.

[caption id=“attachment_1191587” align=“aligncenter” width=“600”]  List of North America’s highest paid CEOs.[/caption]

9. “In the more than 10 years that GMI has been publishing this report, I’ve never seen a top-10 Highest-Paid list that loomed this large,” said Greg Ruel, senior research analyst and author of the report, in a press release. “While the companies in this year’s list have performed well over the past three- and five-year periods in terms of shareholder return, generally speaking, it’s the sheer size and volume of equity awards granted to these top executives that catapults their total compensation to astronomical levels.”

10.Industries like construction materials, office electronics, personal products, hotels, restaurants & leisure and household products had the biggest CEO pay hikes.