Last spring when Bloomberg News examined executive compensation, only two people were paid more than $80 million for a year’s worth of running a company: David Simon of Simon Property Group made $137 million, and Oracle paid Larry Ellison $96 million. But not running a company can be a pretty lucrative undertaking as well, as Time Warner Cable reminded us on Thursday when it disclosed in a government filing that it would pay Rob Marcus, who has served as the company’s chief executive since January, just under $80 million if its deal with Comcast is completed.
The ritual disclosure of the eye-popping golden parachute is an awkward moment in any large merger, and neither Time Warner Cable nor Comcast jumped at the chance to discuss it. When compared to other packages, Marcus’s is larger than most but hardly unique. In 2012, the biggest severance payout went to James Mulva, then the soon-to-be-former CEO of ConocoPhillips; he got $156 million. Last year, at least a dozen executives had pay packages that include parachutes upwards of $100 million, according to an analysis by Bloomberg News. When Henrique de Castro left Yahoo! earlier this year after 14 months as chief operating officer, the company gave him a $64.6 million kiss goodbye.
