Lehman's CEO lost all $500 million or so that he had in Lehman stock, as well as his job and most of his reputation. He's not quite unscathed.
I don't know about AIG's current CEO, but Hank Greenberg, the guy who ran it for 35 years, has lost more than $3 billion. He's been hurt pretty badly by this.
However, I think what AuntB was saying is that these guys may have lost quite a bit, but losing 600m and being left with 'only' 120m is FAR better than some poor chap losing 600,000 and only being left with 12,000. All the principals past and present (ranging from S. Oneal to H. Greenberg) have had financial hits, but none of them will be wanting for money. They got hit by the broadside, but the effect on Joe Citizen is quite different. Joe Citizen will not be able to walk away with tens to hundreds of millions.
So you are both right. You are right in that the CEOs and other principals also got affected (and lost many millions, and in the case of Greenberg over a billion), but AuntB is also right in that while the individual magnitude for loss for the CEOs may be higher than that suffered by joe Citizen, the truly applicable impact on Joe Citizen will be far higher. Sure, Joe Citizen may 'only' have lost a several hundred thousand retirement nestegg while Hank lost over a billion, but Hank is still fabulously rich while Joe is left with a (real) big zero.
Anyways, it will be interesting to see how all of this unwinds.
I don't know about AIG's current CEO, but Hank Greenberg, the guy who ran it for 35 years, has lost more than $3 billion. He's been hurt pretty badly by this.
Precisely, the upper management of these companies will be hit very hard personally. However, unlike Enron or Worldcom, there is no indication that they violated any law.
Worldcom and Enron created a populist and ignorant mindset among some that any time a large corporation fails, its senior executives should go to prison. This is simply not true, there is no law against bad management; the executives at Enron and other companies are in jail because they falsified financial records to make their companies seem healthy, this is not the case with AIG or Lehman.
Except, Richard S. Fuld, Lehman's CEO, received $22 million in 2007 as a bonus: "As recently as March, Fuld was awarded a $22 million bonus for 2007 -- a generous pay package to be sure, but one that also reflected a year in which the bank's net profit had risen 5 percent to a record $4.2 billion."
How did a company go from recording a record profit to busted broke in a few mere months??
He is hardly scathed as he still walks aways with that $22 million and I am sure millions more since he has worked for Lehman since 1969.