Reaping rewards as deep and wide as river of gold

Every year for the past four years, Silicon Valley's main newspaper, the San Jose Mercury News, has published a salary survey of the movers and shakers in the area. Actually, the list is of the top salary earners at Silicon Valley's top 147 companies and it just so happens that nearly all of those companies are technology companies, the Valley being what it is.

This year's survey appeared in mid-June along with a flurry of analytical articles which pointed out such astonishing revelations as the fact that there are, as always, almost no women on the list. Surely this is because women are intelligent enough to realise that it's impossible to have any life on which to spend all those millions when you work the punishing hours of the Valley workday - er, isn't it? But for those men and women that are willing to get up while it's still dark and go to bed in the wee hours, and who also have the wide array of smarts to make a business flourish in the Valley's technology crucible, the financial rewards are as deep and as wide as a river of molten gold.

That's the image used by the author of The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison to describe what it is like truly to strike it rich in the technology industry in California. The book is a biography of the flamboyant founder of database software company, Oracle, (the difference, explains the author, is that God doesn't think he's Larry Ellison).

In it, the author describes the luxuriant pleasure of finding yourself with a hot technology and a hot company - not just knowing the river exists or even viewing it at a distance, but suddenly finding that you are immersed in the glorious middle of an endlessly flowing golden current.

Or to put it more crudely, imagine taking home $116 million (€112 million). In one year. That's exactly what Intel CEO Craig R. Barrett did in 1998, which must cheer a fellow no end. Granted, $114.2 million of that amount came from stock options which he had slowly accumulated over 24 years at the company and decided to sell (as you do). Nonetheless, it's a nice little pay packet, and even represents a cut in pay.

Because Intel had an uneven year, Mr Barrett's base $2.6 million salary is 9.7 per cent lower than it would have been had all gone well.

Mr Barrett's salary also highlights how central options are to the total remuneration of technology execs. Salaries can be so insignificant in the overall scheme of things that some tech execs don't bother to collect one. Apple interim CEO Mr Steve Jobs doesn't bother, for example, nor does Mr Jim Barksdale, head of Netscape, who only paid himself $1 in 1998 (however, he owns 5 per cent of Netscape's stock).

Some who appeared in the list of the top 10 executives in terms of salary were only there because they'd exercised stock options. Mr Gary Valenzuela is the chief financial officer at Yahoo and "only" earns $170,000 annually. But in 1998 he exercised $16.4 million of his Yahoo options, lifting him into the upper echelons. And he still has 1.4 million options left.

For the most part, the best-paid executives are unknown outside tight Valley management circles. For example, there are two more of Mr Barrett's colleagues at Intel, Leslie L. Vadasz, a senior vice-president and director who took home $56.1 million, and Gerhard H. Parker, an executive vice-president who collected $21.8 million.

But keep in mind the quirks that kept some big earners off it. For example, Microsoft CEO Mr Bill Gates isn't there despite being the richest man in the world, because he lives two states northwards, in Washington. Then there are those ever-outside-the-norm Internet companies that don't make the top 147 company list because their actual sales or earnings are too small. Auction site eBay Inc falls into this gap, yet CEO Ms Margaret Whitman is worth $1.2 billion.

It takes your breath away, doesn't it?

Karlin Lillington is at klillington@irish-times.ie