According to beancounters at executive compensation research firm Equilar, Oracle's Larry Ellison has emerged as the highest paid CEO in the US.Apparently Larry took home $84.5 million last year.
Out of the total compensation in 2009, Ellison received more than $78 million in stock and options.
Most of Ellison's pay came in the form of stock option awards, which he has made use of recently. In 2008, Ellison exercised a stunning 36 million options, banking $543 million.
The total compensation includes actual salary received, discretionary and performance-based bonus payouts, the grant-date fair value of new stock and option award.
The maker of outragiously priced printer link HP's Mark Hurd was ranked fourth. He only made $24.2 million last year. At the tenth spot is IBM's Samuel Palmisano, who made $21.2 million. Poor Steve Ballmer who has his children’s college education to worry about apparently failed to make the top ten.
I'm surprised that Ballmer did not make the top 10 though.
While routinely scanning the IBM Journal of Research and Development, Larry discovered a research paper
that described a working prototype for a relational database management system (RDBMS).
Larry quickly realised that by cribbing this idea, the first Commercial Multi-platform SQL DBMS, would fair dinkum him a score of kingdoms from which he should wrangle the good life.
The ink by contrast, has not been so fair to the notorious bushwhacker, Jesse James. His having it off, delving into the wooing words
of tatoo'd-tateastas, has nowt but harry-wangled him the plagiarism.
Them were nowt between the lines, but the sheets.