Apple's Steve Jobs highest paid CEO in America

Apple CEO Steve Jobs was the highest paid chief executive in America for 2006, according to a list released by Forbes on Thursday.

Jobs only draws a dollar a year in salary, which puts him behind practically the entire employment base of the country in that category. But his stock compensation isn't bad. Jobs also owns Apple stock valued at $646.6 million last year, twice as much as the second-highest paid CEO on the list, Occidental Petroleum's Ray Irani. (Somewhere, there's a joke about an oil executive named Irani, but anyway.)

It certainly was a good year for both the oil industry and Apple. Apple reported soaring profits and shipments of both Macs and iPods, and unveiled the iPhone before the usual adoring crowd at Macworld. Forbes ranked Jobs at 36 in terms of efficiency, its term for evaluating performance measured against pay.

Fellow tech executives Terry Semel and Michael Dell joined Jobs in the top 10 highest paid CEOs in the U.S., at the fifth and sixth rankings, respectively. Neither ranked very high in the efficiency column, however, as the past year wasn't easy for either executive. Dell actually had to replace his former CEO, Kevin Rollins, amid a yearlong slide punctuated by an accounting investigation.

[boychuk]

Going out of business

This is just another indication that "beleaguered" Apple will be
going out of business any day now, any day.

[shycelticwitch]

Yeah Right!

What comic books have you been reading to make a silly
comment like that? Apple is far from going out of business, and
is currently becoming more popular with every new innovation
they come up with. It's so simple. People are getting tired of
Microsoft's inability to come up with a stable, SECURE operating
system, and with Mac's new Windows capabilities giving them
other options, more of them are turning to Apple every day. Of
course, the drawback to that is while Windows will run on a Mac
now, it's still Windows, and it still has all the bugs, bad security
and general disfunctionality that it always had.

[bknowledge]

Depends on your point of view.

If you're in Steve's place are you really going to turn down the money. But as a stockholder there would be some changes make to that board of directors.

[krisk0404]

$1 salary is below minimum wage!

Steve Jobs should go to jail with Paris Hilton for paying himself only $1 per year salary which is below minimum wage. Deparment of Labor should investigate him for that crime.

[Jester116]

Does it really matter?

Uh...he MAKES MORE money off of his stocks than he would if he was paid a regular salary. I think thats pretty cool. Plus, it's what he wanted so why would that be illegal?

[apachie2k]

that's nice

that's ridiculous, he's voluntarily electing to charge the company
that amount of money for his work.