Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos
Title: Senior VP, North America Retail
Company: Amazon.com (
AMZN)
CEO: Jeffrey P. Bezos
Pay difference: $5.5 million
Amazon wants its executives to fight for their cash: The company says its base salaries "are designed to provide a minimum level of cash compensation and to be significantly less than those paid by similarly situated companies."
CEO Jeff Bezos collects just $81,840 a year. His only other payout from Amazon in 2010 was the $1.6 million the company spent on his personal security services. Of course, it's easy to pass up bonuses when you own 20% of a company that's valued at $80 billion.
Jeff Wilke, who currently helms the company's North American retail operations, isn't routinely one of Amazon's highest-paid executives, but in April 2010 he scored a 50,000 share grant worth an estimated $7 million. It came with a big catch: The grant doesn't even
start vesting until 2014. It looks like Amazon wants to hang on to Wilke, a 12-year company veteran, for another decade or two.
--S.C.Source:
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