Executives at Twitter make a lot of money. But it’s not just like they make a lot of money relative to you or me, or compared to lower-level employees within the organization. A couple of executives at Twitter make a lot of money compared to their peers at public companies in general, tech or otherwise.
At the same time, they haven’t done a great job of getting a return for their shareholders. Twitter stock has fallen by 65 percent since it listed in late 2013, and that long-term trend doesn’t seem like it’s going to end any time soon.
But about that executive comp: Former Twitter COO Adam Bain made almost $30 million last year — which is an astonishing amount during a period of time in which the stock declined 30 percent.
Bain is gone now and assuming his role is Anthony Noto, who will hold down both the COO and CFO jobs for the foreseeable future. While Noto made less than Bain, he still managed to pull in $23.7 million in total compensation for 2016, as shown in the chart below:
https://twitter.com/barbariancap/status/850450739273117699
I was curious how Twitter exec compensation matched up against other public companies out there. So I went down the list of the top 50 public companies by market cap and looked up how much they paid their top execs in 2016.
With that in mind, here’s a not-very-comprehensive list of public company executives who made less money than Anthony Noto last year, according to Morningstar:
- Apple CEO Tim Cook – $8.7 million
- Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella – $17.7 million
- Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos – $1.7 million
- Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett – $487,881
- Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg – $5 million
- Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg – $18.7 million
- GE CEO Jeff Immelt – $21.3 million
- Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan – $15.9 million
- P&G CEO David Taylor -$14.4 million
- Walmart CEO Doug McMillon – $19.8 million
- Visa CEO Charles Scharf – $16.4 million
- Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam – $17.7 million
- Intel CEO Brian Krzanich – $19.1 million
- Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins – $16 million