Mark Zuckerberg Was Highest Paid U.S. CEO of 2012

Mark Zuckerberg

Mark Zuckerberg was by far the highest paid public CEO in the United States last year, according to a new report.

The Facebook CEO’s total compensation for 2012 was nearly $2.3 billion, more than twice that of the next-highest paid CEO, according to GMI Ratings, which analyzed compensation for more than 2,000 CEOs of publicly traded companies.

Almost all of Zuckerberg’s compensation for the year comes from income related to Facebook’s IPO. On the day Facebook went public, Zuckerberg exercised 60 million stock options worth nearly $2.3 billion (though much of it was used to cover his taxes). He also received a base salary of $500,000 for the year, though starting this year, his salary changed to the symbolic $1 a year.

Richard Kinder, CEO of energy company Kinder Morgan, was second on the list with a total compensation of $1.1 billion. Other tech execs cracked the top 10 list as well, including Apple CEO Tim Cook (with $143 million) and Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff (with $109 million).

Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook in 2004

Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with more than 1 billion users. Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook in 2004 while he was an undergraduate computer science student at Harvard University.

Then called “thefacebook.com,” the site was an instant hit.  Now, nine years later, the site has become one of the biggest web sites in the world. The controversy surrounding Facebook began quickly.  A week after he launched the site in 2004, Mark was accused by three Harvard seniors of having stolen the idea from them.

This allegation soon bloomed into a full-fledged lawsuit, as a competing company founded by the Harvard seniors sued Mark and Facebook for theft and fraud, starting a legal odyssey that continues to 4 years ago.

New information uncovered by Silicon Alley Insider suggests that some of the complaints against Mark Zuckerberg are valid.  It also suggests that, on at least one occasion in 2004, Mark used private login data taken from Facebook’s servers to break into Facebook members’ private email accounts and read their emails–at best, a gross misuse of private information. Lastly, it suggests that Mark hacked into the competing company’s systems and changed some user information with the aim of making the site less useful.

The primary dispute around Facebook’s origins centered around whether Mark had entered into an “agreement” with the Harvard seniors, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and a classmate named Divya Narendra, to develop a similar web site for them — and then, instead, stalled their project while taking their idea and building his own.

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Mark Zuckerberg Was Highest Paid U.S. CEO of 2012 | The Red Elephant