There are periodic spates of minor public outrage over the lavish pay packages of corporate executives. Last week was one of those times—with an unusual twist: General Motors (GM) faced criticism based on revelations that Mary Barra, its new chief executive officer and the first woman to lead a U.S. auto maker, wasn’t being paid enough. It was, for a brief time, cited as evidence that the gender pay gap persists even at the highest echelons of corporate America.
The numbers seemed flawed from the get-go, as Bloomberg Businessweek‘s Sheelah Kolhatkar made clear, since they didn’t include stock awards tied to company performance. On Monday GM released further details to make it clear that Barra will be quite well paid: She could make as much as $14.4 million this year.
That’s a lot of money. Her predecessor at GM, former Carlyle Group (CG) executive Daniel Akerson, received $1.7 million in salary and an additional $7.3 million in stock last year. Barra’s pay might fall short of the most recently disclosed compensation for top executives at Ford (F) or Volkswagen (VOW:GR), but it beats that of many CEOs in the auto industry—in some cases, by a considerable amount.
Here’s a list by company:
• Ford: Alan Mulally, $21 million
• VW: Martin Winterkorn, $19.8 million
• Diamler: Deiter Zetsche, $11.1 million
• Nissan: Carlos Ghosn, $9.7 million
• BMW: Norbert Reithofer, $9 million
• Fiat: Sergio Marchonne, $6 million
• Toyota: Akio Toyoda, $1.8 million
• Honda: Takanobu Ito, $1.4 million
Of course, it has yet to be seen where Barra will actually fall on this list. Last month GM said its new leader would earn $1.6 million in salary and $2.8 million as part of the company’s short-term incentive plan, and only time will tell how the longer-term compensation is doled out. If she makes every dollar possible, it will still be less than what pre-crash chief executive Rick Wagoner made in 2008 ($16.5 million) and almost exactly what he made in 2007.
Setting incentives for executives to hit can be a bit difficult, says Kevin Tynan, an analyst at Bloomberg Industries. Does an effective chief executive maximize stock price or market share? And if market share, are all markets even created equal? “It sort of depends of what you tag these numbers to,” says Tynan. “Is what they’re doing in China more heavily weighted than what they’re doing in Europe and North America.”
As of now, the numbers don’t quite match up with who’s selling the most cars. Mulally’s Ford is the world’s sixth-largest automaker, according to Bloomberg Industries. Total compensation for the chairman of the world’s top automaker, Toyota, is barely above Barra’s base salary. A clear cultural difference does stand out, but it has nothing to do with gender: Japanese executives make peanuts compared to everyone else. Barra’s compensation this year could be 7.5 times what Akio Toyoda makes.
If you’re really looking for outliers, though, look to electric car mogul Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla. His pay package in 2012 was $78 million, when his company sold all of 2,650 cars.
