The Secret Lives of CEOs
Published: Nov 12, 2007
Today, a piece in The Deal revisited these details (and others) about Wall Street bigwigs that the financial media has recently covered, asking if journalists have been just doing their jobs in writing about such details or if they've resorted to digging up tabloid dirt purely for sensationalistic reasons.
Meanwhile, The New York Times ran an article today about CEOs' salaries, focusing on the fallen Charles Prince's $12.5 million payout that just went public (and that pales in comparison to Stan O'Neal's $161.5-million exit package).
And if you're wondering how these and other CEOs continue to bank such large amounts of cash even as their companies slide (or slid) into the red, a recent New Yorker article sheds light on the phenomena. This piece not only addresses how CEOs are paid, focusing on monetary incentives tied to taking large risks, but also explains that these "financial whizzes made bad decisions in part because that’s what they were paid to do."