Tech CEOs salaries feel the crunch

CEO PAY PACKAGES ARE feeling the crunch, with 56 per cent of the poor chief executives receiving smaller bonuses last year than in 2007, while some, like Apple's Steve Jobs and Google's Eric Schmidt have forgone a base salary alltogether.

According to compensation data compiled by AP, the median base salary of CEOs in the top 500 companies rose three per cent to just over a million dollars in 2008. But bonuses and other perks were down 27 per cent - to an average of just $1.3 million. Total compensation was down seven per cent to a paltry median of only $7.6 million for the hardup executives.

AP reckons CEO stock options sank as current share prices are just too low to deliver any profits for company chiefs who now may have to (very slightly) cut back on buying themselves new holiday homes and Ferraris.

However, the shocking statistics are not quite so shocking after all as accountants well versed in the rules of SEC filing manipulation used a whole host of clever tricks to keep their fat cat clients rolling in company cash. Benefits like company chauffeurs, security guards and private jet use, for instance, don't come in to most calculations nor do rather aptly named "tax gross ups", whereby a firm steps in to pay any taxes a CEO may have to actually pay on his own bonus.

Gurgle's Schmidt, although only drawing a base salary of $1 a year, managed to rack up $508,763 in perks for 2008, most of which ($403,000) was blown on personal security whilst at least $100,000 was from use of the firm's private jet.

General Electric's CEO, Jeffrey Immelt, was also hard done by in 2008, stiffed with no yearly bonus to add to his whopping $3.3 million salary. Sheesh, what a crying shame.

It seems telco is still king when it comes to cash compensation for its top men, with Comcast awarding Brian Roberts $24.7 million, Verizon's Ivan Seidenberg raking in $19.9 million, AT&T's Randall Stephenson earning over $15 million and Sprint Nextel's Dan Hesse making just $14.23 million.

Elsewhere in the tech industry, HP's Mark Hurd crawls home with just $34 million lining his pockets, IBM's Samuel Palmisano's cheque is for $21 million, and runt of the litter, Intel CEO Paul Otellini, manages to scrape up just $12.4 million.

Although we did try especially hard, we're finding it a little hard to muster up any sympathy for any of them. µ