Tim Cook: Here’s a breakdown of Apple CEO’s eye-watering annual pay package

Ever wondered how much Apple CEO Tim Cook makes in a year after 10 years of heading the world’s most profitable and valuable company? According to a proxy statement filed by Apple, the figure stood at a whopping $98.7 million in 2021.

While Cook has a base salary of $3 million, he earned an additional $12 million in bonuses, and $82 million in stock awards and the money spent to cover items such as security and private flights (the Apple CEO stopped flying by commercial airline since 2017), The Verge reported.

According to MacRumours, Cook earned $14 million in 2020. The amount also doesn’t include the $750 million in shares vested this year as the final part of a ten-year package that Cook received when he took over from Apple founder Steve Jobs. Some terms of that package changed in 2013 when Apple’s stock underperformed — Apple has claimed this was requested by Cook himself — putting some of the grant at risk if the company didn’t return enough money to shareholders. Since then, however, the Apple stock has skyrocketed and the company became the first trillion-dollar company by market capitalisation in the world in August 2018.

In August, Apple was approaching the $2.5 trillion market capitalisation and briefly shattered the $3-trillion barrier.

However, Cook’s reign has not always been hunky-dory. Apple employees have started coming on record like never before over the past couple of years about the Silicon Valley giant’s internal culture, including pay transparency and the push to return to offices amid the Covid-19 pandemic.

Apple notes in the document that after putting together “base salary, bonuses, commissions, and grant date fair value of equity awards granted to employees in 2021 as our consistently applied compensation measure” to determine the pay of its median employee, they received $68,254 at a compensation ratio of 1,447 to 1.