For the $65.2 million Tim Cook received last year, the Apple CEO is a steal, according to Bloomberg’s Pay Index, which tracks the 100 highest-paid executives, regardless of title, and measures their pay-for-performance rating.
Cook’s $65.2 million compensation package consist of $9.2 million received in cash, including a salary of $1.8 million, a bonus of $6.7 million, and $699,133 for security. His 560,000 restricted shares were worth $56 million at the end of Apple’s fiscal year in September. I doesn’t include the 80,000 restricted stock units granted to him in August 2011.
Bloomberg puts Cook’s pay into perspective by measuring Apples performance for the past three years he has run the company: Revenue is up 69% to $183 billion, and net income is up to $39.5 billion, while sales of iPhone have more than doubled, to $102 billion.
“Apple is just unbelievably killing it,” said Dan Ernst, an analyst at Hudson Square Research in New York. “A good leader like Cook builds a team around him that can do the job.”
This makes Cook the 17th-highest paid US CEO, but only accounts for 0.2% of Apple’s $28.6 billion economic profit, which is the smallest fraction of any company leader in the list. This means that Steve Jobs made a good choice with Tim Cook, and investors love him, because they are getting a better return on each dollar they pay for his work.
By comparison, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella’s $43.5 million is equivalent to 0.4% of Microsoft’s $12.1 billion economic profit, and Exxon Mobil Corp.’s Rex Tillerson’s $32.3 million pay is 0.7 % of the company’s $4.8 billion three-year average economic profit, Bloomberg notes.
