Tim Cook Earned $102 Million in 2017 and Transport via Private Jet

According to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing made public this week, Apple’s top brass — including CEO, Tim Cook; CFO, Luca Maestri; Chief Counsel, Bruce Sewell, and others — received substantial compensation packages in 2017, following what was arguably one of Apple’s most successful years in business on record.

The filing indicates specifically that Maestri and Sewell, along with Apple’s Retail boss, Angela Ahrendts, Vice President of hardware engineering, Dan Riccio, and VP of hardware technologies, Jony Srouji, each received a hefty $24.2 million in compensation — including $3.11 million performance bonuses, across the board, as well as salary and stock — the latter of which will be paid out, according to today’s report, if the executives stay with Apple “long enough for their stock to vest.”

Cook Takes the Cake

By far the largest payout went to Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, who not only received a cushy $9.33 million performance bonus for the year, but also took home $3.06 million in salary and a previously disclosed $89.2 million equity award for serving faithfully as Apple’s CEO since 2011. That brings Cook’s total compensation for 2017 to a whopping $102 million.

As if that weren’t enough, at the behest of Apple’s Board of Directors, Cook was also required to fly around for official business exclusively on a private jet this year, and will continue to moving forward, the report added.

The Board’s decision to set Cook up with his own jet stemmed primarily from security concerns over the Chief Executive’s safety. The report goes on to note that in 2017, the cost of Cook’s private airfare came to about $93,109, while his personal security detail (bodyguards, etc.) cost the tech titan an additional $224,216.

While expenses like these are bound to seem unnecessary, or even wasteful to the rest of us, it’s definitely worth noting that the bigger reason why Apple executives received so much this year is because the iPhone maker grew by leaps and bounds.

Just to put it in perspective: Apple’s stock (NASDAQ: AAPL) started off the year at around $116.15 per share (at market close on January 3, 2017), but are currently up about 39 percent (at $170.55 per share) as of Thursday, December 28th at 3:15 pm EST.

That’s more than double the gains generated by the S&P 500 index, as a whole, Bloomberg noted.

Interestingly, today’s report is absent of any details about what Apple’s Chief Design Officer, Jony Ive, received as compensation for the year. Ive has long been regarded as one of Apple’s most important employees, having designed multiple generations of iPhone, iPad, Mac and more. For the last two years or so, however, Ive reportedly took a break from his design management role to work exclusively on Apple Park and the Steve Jobs Theater — ultimately returning to his original role earlier this month.

There’s also no indication of how well Apple’s iPhone X is performing on the sales stage — though shipping estimates continue to improve. However we can expect Apple to go public with its sales figures for the fiscal quarter ending December 30th, 2017, sometime in late January or early February, 2018, AppleInsider noted.