Thu. Mar 28th, 2024

From the New York Times Blog “DealBook” by Steven Davidoff:

Big paydays on Wall Street often come under laserlike scrutiny, while Silicon Valley gets a pass on its own compensation excesses. Why the double standard?

Take Eric Schmidt, the former chief executive and current chairman of Google. Google’s compensation committee last month awarded Mr. Schmidt $100 million in restricted stock plus $6 million in cash. The stock vests in four years and comes on the heels of a $100 million award made in 2011.

It’s unclear why Google felt the need to award Mr. Schmidt this amount.

When asked for comment, a representative of Google directed me to the regulatory filing Google made disclosing Mr. Schmidt’s compensation award. The filing states the award was paid “in recognition of his contributions to Google’s performance in fiscal year 2013.” How about that for detail?

Mr. Schmidt already owns shares worth billions of dollars in Google, and has a net worth of more than $8 billion, according to Forbes. So the latest award amount is just a few ducats to him.

As chairman, Mr. Schmidt does make a substantial contribution to Google, including helping the company negotiate a settlement with the European Union in an antitrust case. But his pay is extraordinarily high for a chairman. The typical director at a Standard & Poor’s 500 company was paid $251,000 in 2012, according to Bloomberg News. Mr. Schmidt is above that range by over $100 million.

Still, the pay award was greeted with few questions and apparently no criticism from Google’s shareholders or others. Compare this with the continued outcry over Wall Street executive pay.

The latest was the criticism of Jamie Dimon’s pay for 2013, given the many regulatory travails of his bank, JPMorgan Chase. The bank’s board awarded Mr. Dimon $20 million in pay for 2013, $18.5 million of which was in restricted stock that vests over three years.

In doing so, the JPMorgan board stated that the award was justified because of JPMorgan’s “sustained long-term performance; gains in market share and customer satisfaction; and the regulatory issues the company has faced and the steps the company has taken to resolve those issues.”

While JPMorgan may be hogging the regulatory limelight at the moment, other Wall Street banks have faced that glare and have been questioned about their chief executives’ compensation. Total pay for Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs, no stranger to regulatory scrutiny, has not yet been disclosed, but he was recently awarded $14 million in stock. Once his cash bonus is announced, Mr. Blankfein will probably be paid an amount similar to Mr. Dimon’s.

Like JPMorgan’s board, Goldman’s board has sought to justify such pay and is criticized just the same.

This double standard for finance and technology doesn’t make sense.

Read the entire article here.

By Editor