Apple CEO Tim Cook Earned $9.2M in Fiscal 2014, Doubling 2013 Compensation

[ValSalva]

If you don't like Apple's record when it comes to what they announce vs. what they ship, you REALLY don't want to look at ANY tech other company

My bets are that the Apple Watch will ship, AND will do more (not less) than shown in October.

I'm critical of Apple because I love their products. I want them to do well and am disappointed when they fall short.

I came from Windows and will never go back. It's a fundamentally flawed product. And the crap from the likes of HP, Dell, etc. make me want to run for the hills.

Who knows how the Apple Watch will do. Cook celebrating in October like it already had iPhone-like sales was uncomfortable to watch (not pun intended). Seemed more like personal vindication that Cook could oversee a new product category than anything else.

 

[jacobj]

He is...someone who has 1 cent above you, makes you poorer than the other person. Definition black on white

----------

I don't know on any other company that the MAIN CHIEF to have less than others from the same company

Really? It happens all the time in terms of value awarded in the year in the finance industry. The real value at the CEO level is their stock holdings. If you were to look at assets awarded due to his position he will be doing very nicely. In terms of growth in assets over the past year, again he will have had a bumper year.

And the of course there were the good old days of the $1 salary drawn by SJ

 

[s2mikey]

Neither did Bill Gates, Larry Ellison or Howard Hughes... I'm sure I'm leaving a few drop-out tycoons off the list...

That's because college only gets you a cubicle job working UNDER these guys. Truly successful people usually do NOT come from the education ranks. That's because college only charges you for a sheet of paper and teaches you mostly useless book facts. Real success comes from hard work, ambition, and taking risks. NONE of those things are taught at any college.

 

[maflynn]

That's a lot of money, yet I think apple is worse off. While they're making money hand over fist, they look more like Microsoft of the 90s.Taking less chances and trying to protect their position.

 

[applepuree]

And meanwhile retail staff struggle by on minimum wages (at least in my country)

 

[willmtaylor]

Hmm, Kobe Bryant makes 23.5 million this year to dribble and shoot a basketball! What is the world coming to?

Correction: to sit on the bench and whine.

 

[Doomtomb]

i hope the youth of today see that there's a way to make serious cash without being an athlete or entertainer. finish school.

School doesn't make someone successful. In fact, it conditions you and makes you ready to stick it out in the trenches for years and years, while really going nowhere. Entrepreneurs are not taught.

 

[mac8867]

Angela should be PISSED !! Wow, the one woman on the executive team earns half of what any of her peers do. I guess she isn't as good at her job as the others.

 

[SHNXX]

Although 9 million dollars is a lot of money, this is not relatively (compared to other CEOs) high.

----------

That's a lot of money, yet I think apple is worse off. While they're making money hand over fist, they look more like Microsoft of the 90s.Taking less chances and trying to protect their position.

9 million for the world's most valuable company isn't really a big deal.

Besides, it's not even his real pay (his stock option from a few years back is valued much higher)

 

[Derekuda]

Sorry, but I think Tim Cook is an idiot. He's ruined apple innovation and has made apple a follower and not a leader.

 

[lowendlinux]

He has a gay agenda?

 

[bbeagle]

i hope the youth of today see that there's a way to make serious cash without being an athlete or entertainer. finish school.

Finishing school will NOT make you rich.

Finishing school will increase your odds on allowing you to have a job your entire life, live comfortably and retire comfortably.

Having extreme motivation, risking it all, and starting your own business increases your odds on becoming rich.

Being born into rich parents has the best odds to become rich - taking over the parent's company, finding other rich friends to invest with, or just getting an inheritance.

That's just the way it is.

 

[MasterRyu2011]

Correction: to sit on the bench and whine.

Correction: To attract ticket buyers. No matter how much Kobe has declined (arguable), he brings in sales. Don't companies reward their top sales people well??

 

[CEmajr]

Neither did Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg. As someone who's been to college, I can honestly say that college is overrated, at least as far as being in a successful career field is concerned. Of course I'm not saying college is useless. For me, what I ended up wanting to do didn't require any college at all. College did help me realize what I didn't want to do and that led to what I did want to do. I think that's the important part of college people fail to grasp. The focus in college should be about learning, figuring things and doing things that interest you rather than getting a piece of paper that says you're qualified for something.

Steve Jobs audited the calligraphy courses because typography interested him. He didn't know what he would do with this knowledge or what it would lead to. I'm sure more than one person probably told him it was a waste of time. As it turns out, his decision to take those classes changed the world more than a decade later.

While college isn't a requirement nor guarantee of a successful career, it significantly increases the chances of it. It's not a coincidence that higher education levels correlate with higher income. Ellison, Jobs, Gates, Zuckerberg, etc. are extreme anomalies and not the norm.

 

[pondosinatra]

I believe Steve's salary was $1...

 

[Patriot24]

Angela should be PISSED !! Wow, the one woman on the executive team earns half of what any of her peers do. I guess she isn't as good at her job as the others.

This is what happens when people look at numbers without understanding context. Her deal was specifically stock-heavy to cover the cost of potential losses from leaving Burberry. You'll notice that she was given $70 million in stock. She will make infinitely more this way as opposed to salary-based gains.

She negotiated the deal this way.

----------

I believe Steve's salary was $1...

A nice gesture, but an impactful decision. His stock in the company was worth billions. Who cares about a $1 million salary?

 

[Saucesome2000]

For the most valuable company in the world, this is far less than I would have ever guessed.

 

[IJ Reilly]

Neither did Bill Gates. Or Brad Pitt.

Still, it's an awful lot of money for an EMPLOYEE, and he does not have to take any personal responsibility. If he fails, it'll be the company and the other employees that have to take the fall - it's not like Tim Cook or any other employed manager would have to cover the losses out of their own pockets. It's not necessarily a severe punishment for a millionaire to be out of a job - for employees with a normal salary, it is.

The relation between the normal staff's average salary - read: the people that do the actual work, product design and development - and the salaries of the upper management class is, well, "kaputt", broken.

QFT. Not much to add here except to note that the compensation system is heavily rigged in favor of top earners. They treat each other very well. And in the U.S. particularly, the tax system is also rigged in favor of top earners who can take most of their salaries in capital gains and dividends. Anyone who thinks otherwise simply isn't aware.

----------

“Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” —John Steinbeck

This is such a great quote. The observation was made decades ago, but it still explains so much of the dynamics of American politics today.

 

[Cabby]

i hope the youth of today see that there's a way to make serious cash without being an athlete or entertainer. finish school.

Only if you want to be kinda rich. Top 10 athletes and entertainers will make way more, and in a much shorter time. But then will blow it all, unlike most business professionals. So perhaps I just talked myself out of it, being smart is better just in case you get rich.

 

[fmalloy]

Dear Ms. Angela Ahrendts,

Before accepting these ridiculously big bucks, how about getting off your Burberry-clothed ass and you know, actually DO something more than fly around and do photo ops at existing Apple Stores that Ron Johnson designed and managed.

Dress me in designer crap and give me a flashy office and I can do the same thing at one-tenth the salary you're getting.

That is all, and have a great day!

 

[WardC]

He works hard for the money.

...so you better treat him right...

 

[tito2020]

Kind of makes me feel like a peasant!

I guess we keep buying apple products and he keeps raking in the dough with our money.

 

[LordVic]

ugg, no problems with Cook's salary (its a lot, maybe better used elsewhere, but compared to everyone else in that list, he seems like the most reasonable down to earth of them)

when i see someone like that new hire getting only 411+500k in salary, but 70 MILLION In stock... you KNOW it's being done that way as a tax loophole that has to be fixed.

(hint, in the USA, you are taxed significantly less on Capital gains than on labour, so this individual only gets their income taxed on the 911k, and capital gains of approximately 23% on 50% of the stock)

 

[Belmont31R]

People also spend a lot of money to watch Kobe play basketball and he is solely responsible for much of the fan base and success of the team. Cook, like other CEOs are WAY overcompensated for what they actually do versus all of those under him that do real actual work.

Athletes are paid too much too, I agree but what they actually produce is way more than any CEO. The way you can tel is that no one hardly ever complains about what a TOP athlete gets paid but everyone on the planet finds CEOs way overpaid which they are.

Look at it this way: If cook leaves Apple, they replace him with some other media savvy stiff to atend the meetings, suck the shareholder knob, and pander to the public. If Kobe leaves the Lakers, the team crumbles and they stink until they find a player as good as Kobe. HUGE difference with there.

Umm no. CEO's have ran good businesses into the ground. And good CEO's have taken companies who are in the gutter and turned them into success stories. Businesses are not self running entities where the CEO does little. They are paid to make decisions that come with huge responsibilities that no one else in the company has to make.

 

[Carnegie]

ugg, no problems with Cook's salary (its a lot, maybe better used elsewhere, but compared to everyone else in that list, he seems like the most reasonable down to earth of them)

when i see someone like that new hire getting only 411+500k in salary, but 70 MILLION In stock... you KNOW it's being done that way as a tax loophole that has to be fixed.

(hint, in the USA, you are taxed significantly less on Capital gains than on labour, so this individual only gets their income taxed on the 911k, and capital gains of approximately 23% on 50% of the stock)

That's not correct. The value of the stock at the time it vests is taxable at ordinary income tax rates. If they choose to keep the stock and it goes up in value from there, then that gets treated as capital gains (depending on how long they keep it). It's much the same as it would be if they were paid the same amount in cash and then used that money to buy stock.

Typically the company withholds a certain amount of the stock that vests in order to remit the income tax that will be owed on it. For people with this much income, that ends up being a very large portion of the stock award. For Mr. Cook, for example, you can see on the SEC filings that more than half of the stocks that he receives are withheld when they vest to meet the tax withholding requirement. Often the rest of the stock is sold as well at the time that it vests pursuant to the employee's pre-established trading plan (which plan is set-up to avoid insider trading allegations).