Jacques Youssef

MSN Money: The 5 most overpaid CEOs

Posted by Jacques on October 3, 2009 | 2 Comments

Another infuriating article I came across at MSN Money. While the rest of the United States is in an economic depression, the CEOs of these companies see themselves privileged enough to continue paying themselves excessive amounts of money while their stocks keep dropping and their stockholders actually lose money.

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Posted Oct 02 2009, 09:07 AM by Michael Brush

A CEOs’ job is to make a company perform for shareholders. So in a year like 2008, when the S&P 500 fell 37%, you’d expect CEOs to share your pain.

Not so much, a look at the final numbers from 2008 by the Corporate Library shows:

• While shareholders suffered miserably, annual pay for CEOs barely moved down at all.
• And total realized pay, a broader measure that includes money from cashing out stock options and stock vesting, was off by 6.4%. (That’s because the market crash made it harder for CEOs to earn money cashing out options. But 6.4% is a far cry from the 37% loss suffered by shareholders.)

“Surely with the collapse in the economy seen last year, real pay should have declined by more,” says Paul Hodgson, author of the 2009 CEO Pay Survey, where these numbers come from. “If there were ever an argument that pay is fatally divorced from performance, then this surely is it.”

Read the rest of the article at MSN Money

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Once again I am interested in all of your thoughts and ideas on this.

-Jacques