Like most people I am fascinated by how much the world’s most powerful people earn, but even I was staggered at just how much the head of Apple earns.
The good news for us nosey people is that because Apple is a public company, this financial information is easily accessible public information. The particulars for 2014 were just published and they make very interesting reading.
So here is how Apple’s top earners fared in 2014:
Tim Cook earned just over $9.2 million during 2014. $1.7 million of that amount was paid as his salary, $6.7 million was paid as ‘non-equity compensation’ – this means, the money he is paid based on how the company performs. This is more than double the amount he was paid in 2013, which was approximately $4.2 million.
New to Apple, Angela Ahrendts, who was hired from Burberry to head up Apple’s retail strategy, made $73 million. The lion’s share of that amount $70 million was paid as stock.
Peter Oppenheimer, the CFO of Apple earned a little over $4.5 million and then promptly retired in September. This amount was roughly twice his 2013 pay.
Peter Oppenheimer’s replacement was Luca Maestri, he made $14 million, $13 million of which was stock and bonuses.
Eddy Cue, who is the boss of iTunes, App Store, Apple Pay, Siri, Apple Maps and iCloud earned $24 million of which $20 million was stock. This amount is incredibly 12 times his 2013 earnings.
Jeff Williams who is Apple’s Supply chain head (SVP of Operations) earned $24 million, $20 million of which was stock.
These amounts do not even take into account any net worth gained on Apple stock that each executive already owned, and seeing that Apple stock did nothing but increase during 2014, that increase is likely to be a vast sum of money in its own right. The phenomenal stock increase can most likely be attributed to the launch of the iPhone 6 among others.
Some Apple executives made more than others, but all of them made much more than most of us can even begin to imagine.
