It’s as I suspected. I don’t know of any ceo who can
set their salary, and I don’t know of any who is paid
a $120 million salary, even with bonuses. Too many
times when one hears of a ceo making millions of dollars,
you don’t hear that part of that is based on stock options.
Options tend to come with an expiration date, and
if Whitman was quitting, then she might have had to sell
her options that had vested. The company did well when
she was ceo, seems to me she earned the profits she made
off those options.
I don’t think that she was forced to sell, but maybe she chose to sell some.
With a huge portion of her wealth in eBay stock, that would be an appropriate thing to do.
I figured that she chose to cash in $120 million worth of options — which is a far cry from “paying oneself.”
The other half of the allegations in the ad, regarding spinning IPO shares, was indeed true.