Dodd-Frank rules? Securities and Exchange Commission lawyers? Leave them behind. And let yourself sink into the buttery leather seat of your corporate jet as it soars through the clouds.
That’s what Steve Wynn did. As chief executive of Wynn Resorts, he sat back and enjoyed more than a million dollars’ worth of personal travel last year on his company’s private jet.
It gets better: in December, the company took delivery of the first G650 jet to roll off Gulfstream’s assembly line. A $65 million wonder, the plane can whisk Mr. Wynn from Las Vegas, where Wynn Resorts has its headquarters, to New York, where he owns a $70 million penthouse overlooking Central Park, and it should make 2013 another busy year aloft for him. (Wynn Resorts declined to comment.)
Indeed, while Mr. Wynn may have been a very frequent flier in 2012 among chief executives listed in an annual survey of executive pay conducted for The New York Times by Equilar, an executive compensation data firm, he has plenty of company in the shareholder-unfriendly skies.
As C.E.O. of Hertz, Mark Frissora pushes rental cars, but he racked up nearly a half-million dollars’ worth of personal travel on the corporate jet last year.
Marsh McLennan, the risk management company, doesn’t own its own plane — it prefers holding a fractional share of a jet — but that didn’t stop its chief, Brian Duperreault, from running up $441,875 in private plane travel on the company tab before he retired at year-end.
These highfliers help explain why pay for perks like jet travel and other supplemental benefits including pension contributions and life insurance policies jumped last year, even as overall compensation rose only modestly.
For the 100 highest-paid C.E.O.’s among American companies with revenue of more than $5 billion, the typical 2012 perks package was worth $320,635, up 18.7 percent from 2011, according to an analysis by Equilar for The Times. By contrast, median total pay among the 100 C.E.O.’s rose just 2.8 percent, to more than $14 million.
The data are preliminary — public companies have 120 days after their fiscal year-end to disclose the pay of top executives in their proxies. Many corporations whose fiscal year ended in December won’t file before the end of April.
Still, the data reveal the contours of executive pay packages. Besides the jump in perks, overall cash compensation also made a comeback, rising 19.7 percent, to $5.7 million. Cash bonuses jumped 25 percent.
THE highest-paid C.E.O., Lawrence J. Ellison of Oracle, perennially ranks among the best-paid executives, but other leaders in 2012 didn’t come from sectors where you might expect to find them, like technology or Wall Street.
Instead, companies with familiar brand names were among the most generous, with Robert A. Iger of Disney, Mark G. Parker of Nike, Howard Schultz of Starbucks and Kenneth I. Chenault of American Express all in the top 10, each with more than $25 million in total compensation.
The second-highest-paid chief executive on the list, Richard M. Bracken of the hospital chain HCA, received more than half his pay in the form of special compensation worth nearly $22 million, but it was nearly all from from dividends rather than traditional perks like the company plane.
Shareholders, too, enjoyed solid gains in 2012, with the typical company’s stock returning 17 percent.
And at a few companies where profits dropped, C.E.O. pay declined as well. At Ford, where earnings per share fell 7 percent, the pay of the chief executive, Alan R. Mulally, sank 29 percent. James P. Gorman, the chief of Morgan Stanley, saw his compensation fall 20 percent as both revenue and profits at the company tumbled in 2012.
J.C. Penney did not make this year’s list because it filed its proxy after the March 29 cutoff, but its board definitely sent a message to Ron Johnson, the former Apple executive who took over in late 2011 and has so far failed to turn around this troubled retailer. It cut his total compensation by almost 97 percent, to $1.9 million, and didn’t give him and several other top execs any bonus payments.
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/07/business/executive-pay-shows-modest-2012-gain-but-oh-those-perks.html?partner=rss&emc=rss