Tracking executive pay follows a familiar pattern: Collect compensation disclosures, read said documents as they pile up, and when the usual suspects have all filed their annual reports and proxy statements, put the numbers into a spreadsheet and sort descending.
It’s pretty much guaranteed Johnson & Johnson’s CEO will be near the top of the list, regardless who’s in the job. Same for Abbott Laboratories—until it spun off its pharma business, AbbVie, whose CEO is now a regular. Same for Bristol-Myers Squibb—from Jim Cornelius to Lamberto Andreotti and now Giovanni Caforio, M.D.
What’s not guaranteed is that the chairman of a generics maker in hot water with the U.S. government and American parents—Mylan’s Robert Coury—would step off the company’s employee roster and into the nonexecutive chairman’s job and reap a $97 million package with the move.
