Dive Brief:
- For the first time, a woman climbed into the top 10 list of highest compensated executives, according to the Bloomberg Pay Index. In 2016, IBM's Ginni Rometty, the sixth highest paid executive and the No.1 woman had a pay package worth $96.8 million if you use Bloomberg's numbers.
- However, IBM reports Rometty's package at $32.7 million. The discrepancy, according to Bloomberg, is the result of a "21% rebound in IBM shares."
- Other women on the Bloomberg list from the tech industry are Meg Whitman and Safra Catz, but they earn significantly lower than Rometty. Whitman, who runs Hewlett Packard Enterprise, is listed at $52.5 million and Oracle's Catz came in at $39.2 million.
Dive Insight:
This gulf between what Big Blue reports and what others report is not so much a tech problem as it is an accounting one. At issue here is the way companies calculate stock options. IBM's computations, by way of a third-party, are a long-standing process and are not likely to change soon.
Where things really don't add up is when factoring in IBM's continuous dips and drops in revenue and shares under Rometty. But, the shareholders met in Tampa, FL last month and signed off on a package that the company said was worth $32.7 million. This action suggests they bought into Rometty's plan to focus more on software and services to pull the company up. But this vote was also based on a roughly $33 million deal and not the close to $100 million that Bloomberg is reporting.
So worrisome are the IBM results that Warren Buffett cut his shares back to 50 million. He previously held 81 million.
