SAN MATEO — Leave it to the thrill-seeking inventor of the GoPro action camera to rocket to the top of Silicon Valley’s highest-paid chief executives last year.
GoPro CEO Nick Woodman earned $77.4 million in compensation, making him the best-paid CEO in the Bay Area, according to What the Boss Makes, the annual Equilar Silicon Valley CEO Pay Study conducted for the Bay Area News Group.
The 40-year-old Silicon Valley native hit the jackpot when the video camera company he founded after a 2002 surfing trip went public last summer.
His pay at GoPro grew more than 4,000 percent, nearly all due to stock awards, and catapulted him above perennial moneymaker Larry Ellison of Oracle, who made $67.3 million last year — a 14 percent cut from 2013.
The annual Bay Area list is typically topped by a mix of billionaire tech founders — such as Ellison and Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff — and hired execs who run legacy giants such as Wells Fargo and Chevron. But it can also fluctuate wildly as companies rise, fall, change leaders or dole out seven-figure stock grants one year and none the next.
In the 2013 study, Zynga’s CEO Don Mattrick was second only to Ellison, but Mattrick didn’t make the top 50 last year. His compensation totaled $8.2 million, down from $58 million in 2013, when he was hired to turn around the troubled San Francisco gamemaker. It didn’t work, and he abruptly stepped down this spring.
Another aspiring turnaround chief, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, saw her pay rise 69 percent to $42.1 million, which placed her at No. 3 on the Bay Area list and the best-paid female chief executive in the country. Much of the spike was tied to grants awarded back in 2012 to lure her to Yahoo from Google, but they only took effect last year and ballooned in value thanks to Yahoo’s big stake in Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba. Mayer’s $28.2 million in option awards last year and $11.8 million in stock awards supplemented a $1 million salary.
Fourth on the list was Benioff, who made $39.9 million, mostly in option awards, running the San Francisco cloud computing company he cofounded in 1999. Fifth was software maker NetSuite’s CEO, Zachary Nelson, whose salary rose 153 percent to $31.6 million. His $28 million stock award was the second-largest after GoPro’s Woodman, and the two will have plenty of opportunity to share advice on what to do with that money soon: GoPro and NetSuite are building new campuses across the street from one another in San Mateo.
Sixth, at $25 million, was John Hammergren, longtime CEO of San Francisco medical product wholesaler McKesson.
Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman ranked seventh with $19.6 million. Women were poorly represented on the list, just 10 out of 175, but four of them — Whitman, Mayer and retail executives Laura Alber of Williams-Sonoma (No. 21, at $14.7 million) and Barbara Renter of Ross Stores (No. 27, at $12.1 million) — were on the high end.
Rounding out the top 10 were Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf, with $19.3 million; Gilead CEO John Martin, with just under $19 million; and Chevron CEO John Watson, with $18.6 million.
Conspicuously absent from the top of the list were some of the region’s best-known tech magnates, such as Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk.
“These CEOs may be expected to be flush with cash, but they’re ultimately taking home far less than most of their peers in Silicon Valley,” said Dan Marcec of Equilar, the Redwood City-based firm that tracks executive compensation and provided the data for this newspaper.
Of the 175 CEOs measured in the study, the chief executives of Google, Facebook and Tesla ranked in the bottom 15, along with the CEOs of Pandora, Yelp, Twitter, SolarCity and Trulia. None of those CEOs received option awards, and their compensation ranged from nothing to $610,000 for Zuckerberg, who had a $1 salary but accepted Facebook-chartered private flights and other perks that count toward total compensation. The study does not measure net worth.
Apple CEO Tim Cook was No. 42, at $9.2 million, about 117 percent more than he made the previous year.
Median salary was about $600,000. Only two CEOs received salaries above $2 million: Reed Hastings at Netflix made $2.96 million, just ahead of Stumpf at Wells Fargo, who made $2.8 million. But stock awards pushed Stumpf’s total compensation to No. 8, at $19.3 million, and Hastings to No. 35, with $11.1 million.
How long Woodman ranks at or near the top of the list depends on many factors, from sales performance to stock price and whatever next big thing goes public in the coming years. But with 4.5 million restricted stock options awarded to him shortly before the IPO, he has even bigger gains on the way if his company does well.
“We work very, very hard,” Woodman said during a recent conference call with shareholders reporting GoPro’s quarterly earnings, speaking not just of management but of a growing workforce of more than 1,300 people. “We run fast and we run hard and it’s working.”
Contact Matt O’Brien at 408-920-5011. Follow him at Twitter.com/Mattoyeah.
