You think you’re already a head honcho in your company? If you’re not the CEO, you’re probably making peanuts compared to what these guys are making.
The average pay for a chief executive was $11.3 million last year, an increase of 27% over the year before, according to a survey of 200 large companies by Pearl Meyer & Partners, the compensation division of Clark Consulting. That was 208 times the average household’s earnings in 2004.
Here’s what the Top 10 CEO are earning as per the Forbes Magazine CEO list
Let’s take the case of Mr. Ellison…
Last year, he made $192,920,000. That’s around $16,000,000 a month or roughly $535,888.00 PER DAY! OMG!
With that amount of money, the CEO from Oracle can buy 3.2 MILLION BOXES of Fallout 3 ($60 a box). That’s enough to give a box to every single citizen of Panama (population: 3.2M). Egad!
In the same light, he can also buy 482,000 pieces of the PS3 for what he makes in a year. He can then give a PS3 to everyone in the country of Malta
A single American, earning the minimum wage of $5.31 / hour will take 4,200 years (working without sleep or breaks) to achieve what he earned in a year.
“A top-level executive is probably worth his or her weight in gold as far as what they do for the economy,” says Brent Longnecker, CEO salaries expert and president of Longnecker & Associates, an executive salaries and corporate governance consulting firm. “They create jobs. They increase the tax base with which the United States can grow. They give us a competitive edge in the world markets. They do a lot of things with a lot of pressure on them that we really never talk about.”
In the same light, there is INDEED a big disparity between the wages of CEOs and “sararimen” (salary men). The US is among the top countries with a wide gap.
The bottomline here is that, if the CEO does indeed perform his (or her) job and the company gains profit, then the pay’s worth it. But profit sometimes comes with a big stick called “lay offs” and “cost cutting”. The average salary guy will be at the short end of that stick.
Now that sucks.
