Zuckerberg sets new record for corporate compensation with $2.37bn earnings

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has reportedly set a new record for corporate compensation in 2012 worth more than 2.37 billion dollars, a new survey by a corporate governance firm has revealed.

According to the GMI Ratings, Zuckerberg's salary of 5, 03,000 dollars and bonus of 2, 66,000 dollars were eclipsed by stock options worth around 2.27 billion dollars.

The GMI report indicated that it was the first year that any chief executive collected more than one billion dollars, Sydney Morning Herald reports.

Apart from Zuckerberg, Kinder Morgan's Richard Kinder also topped one billion in 2012, by paying salary of one billion dollars and giving stock worth more than 1.1billion dollars.

The ratings revealed that the third-highest paid was by Sirius XM Radio's Mel Karmazin at 255 million dollars, followed by Liberty Media's Gregory Maffei at 254 million dollars and Apple's Tim Cook at 143 million dollars.

Author of the report, Greg Ruel said that GMI has never seen a top ten highest paid list that loomed this large adding that it is the sheer size and volume of equity awards granted to these top executives that catapults their total compensation to astronomical levels.

According to the report, the massive compensation packages are generally due to stock awards, often in the form of options which allow a CEO to buy shares at a fixed price and cash in on gains.

GMI said that Zuckerberg exercised 60 million stock options, granted in 2005 and fully vested by 2010, at a strike price of just six cents and when the social media giant went for its public debut, its CEO's worth vaulted more than 2 billion dollars on the difference.