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Apple shareholders voted Friday to approve a nearly $100 million compensation package for CEO Tim Cook — signaling their support despite an advisory firm’s stance that the awards were a tad excessive.
Cook’s lucrative pay package for Apple’s 2021 fiscal year calls for $98.73 million in total compensation — including more than $82 million in stock awards, a $12 million bonus for hitting internal performance targets and a $3 million base salary.
The Apple boss’s deal was 1,447 times larger than the pay package offered to the tech giant’s average employee.
The vote in favor of Cook’s pay package was largely symbolic. While shareholders in public companies are allowed to weigh in on executive compensation, the votes are nonbinding — meaning Apple could have moved forward with the plan even if shareholders had voted to reject it.
Still, a rejection would have marked a significant rebuke for Apple.
In February, Institutional Shareholder Services, an advisory firm, argued shareholders should vote down the compensation. The firm said that elements of Cook’s payday, such as $712,000 for private jet travel, were extreme compared to those offered by similar companies.
“There are significant concerns regarding the design and magnitude of the equity award made to CEO Cook,” ISS said in a report ahead of the shareholder meeting.
Apple outlined the pay plan in an SEC filing made public in January — noting the company’s stock price and revenue had surged under Cook’s leadership. Cook received an equity award for the first time since he was named CEO in 2011.
Cook’s pay marked a significant increase compared to the previous year, when he earned the relatively paltry sum of $14.8 million in compensation.
Shareholders also voted to confirm Apple’s board of directors and approved a proposal pushing the company to conduct an independent civil rights audit of its internal policies and practices. Meanwhile, shareholders rejected proposals calling for enhanced transparency about Apple’s plans to address gender and racial pay gaps and concerns about the use of alleged forced labor in its supply chain.
With Post wires
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