With a total compensation of $2.28 billion, Mark Zuckerberg smoked the other CEOs last year.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg was the highest paid CEO of a North American public company last year, with total compensation of $2.28 billion — almost all of it coming from share options exercised when Facebook went public, according to GMI Ratings, a global research firm.
In total, the 10 highest-paid chief executives took home a combined $4.7 billion in compensation in 2012, the highest total in the 11 years GMI has been releasing its annual compensation reports. For the first time, two CEOs got more than $1 billion, and not one CEO in the top 10 got less than $100 million. Stock option profits accounted for $3.3 billion of the total realized compensation earned by the group.