Apple executives get millions in bonuses as stock tumbles

Davey Winder
Wednesday, 01 October 2008 16:34

IT Industry - Market

It seems that the total value of the shares, based on that low Monday closing price, exceeds USD $122 million. But just how exactly are the spoils divided?

After the COO comes Ron Johnson, the Senior Vice President Retail, along with Chief Financial Officer, Peter Oppenheimer. These fortunate chaps get a credit crunch busting bonus of 150,000 shares each.

That's around USD $15 million per head, nice work if you can get it! But that still leaves the odd USD $70 million or so to account for, so how does that get divvied up between the remaining 6 lucky Apple executives?

As it happens, pretty evenly. Jonathan Ive, the iPod design guru and four other executives (Senior Vice President Worldwide Product Marketing, Senior Vice President Software Engineering, Senior Vice President Mac Hardware Engineering and Senior Vice President iPhone Software) get 120,000 shares each. That works out at USD $12.5 million each.

I feel sorry for Daniel Cooperman, a recent recruit to Apple from HP, who has to make do with a paltry 60,000 shares worth just USD $6 million.

Sure, these are restricted shares. But all that means is that the executives have to hang around with Apple until March 24th 2012 in order to be able to cash in. I get the feeling that, with those golden handcuffs in place, will not be problematical.

Especially seeing as Apple stock is already bouncing back up in value, the last time I looked today they were sitting pretty at USD $113 a share. Which means those executive bonuses are getting bigger by the day.

Now, about your mortgage payments, fellow plebs...