Mark Zuckerberg has proved that it pays to have a lot of friends. The man who championed requesting to become friends online through Facebook raked in nearly $2.3bn last year.
According to GMI Ratings, Zuckerberg’s compensation for 2012 was over $2.2bn, more than twice that of the next highest paid CEO. GMI analysed more than 2,000 CEOs of publicly traded companies.
Richard Kinder, CEO of energy company Kinder Morgan was second on the list with compensation of $1.1bn. Also in the top 10 were Apple CEO Tim Cook with $143m and Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff with $109m.
Almost all of Zuckerberg’s compensation last year came from Facebook’s IPO. Although he received a base salary of $500,000 for the year, on the day Facebook went public, Zuckerberg exercised 60 million stock options worth nearly $2.3bn. Much of this was used to cover his taxes.
2012 also saw Zuckerberg in the top 20 on Forbes’ list of the 400 richest Americans as he saw his net worth double to $19bn. This jumped him from the 36th on the list to the number 20 spot.
Zuckerberg wasn’t the only tech exec to rank high on this year’s Forbes list. The top 50 featured several founders from Microsoft, Amazon, Google and other prominent tech companies.
Bill Gates topped the list with a net worth of $72bn.
