INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
billionaires in Silicon Valley is easy
Dropbox's Arash Ferdowsi and Veeva Systems's Peter Gassner both crossed the threshold this year, and tech fortunes make up a fifth -- or
about $1 trillion -- of the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.But tracking down members of the three-comma club at Apple is a less fruitful
endeavor even though the iPhone-maker is the world's most valuable company, with a market capitalization of $879 billion.Chairman Art
Levinson is the only insider to make the cut, and Apple stock accounts for just 20 percent of his $1 billion fortune, according to
The rest comes from his long tenure at Genentech, where he was chairman and chief executive officer, and an early stake in Google.No other
Apple insider comes close
CEO Tim Cook has a $600 million fortune, which reflects a pay program that's restrained relative to the company's size and
performance.According to the Bloomberg Pay Index, which ranks the best-paid senior managers at public U.S
companies, Apple's leaders are downright bargains
The cost of executive compensation as a fraction of economic profit -- defined as after-tax operating profit minus capital costs -- was the
lowest among the companies whose bosses were the country's 200 best-paid in the most recent fiscal year.That has led to relatively small
insider holdings, underscoring how few known billionaires the Cupertino, California-based company has spawned since its recovery from the
brink of bankruptcy in 1997."Apple came back from the dead and that messed up the cap table," said Gene Munster, a co-founder of Loup
Ventures and a long-time Apple watcher
"You didn't have that very centralized ownership any more."That sets it apart from other tech mega-caps, whose founders and occasional
employees increasingly dominate the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, which tracks the wealth of the world's 500 richest people.They include
Amazon.com's Jeff Bezos; Alphabet's Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Eric Schmidt; Microsoft's Bill Gates; and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Jan
Fortunes associated with these companies account for about 10 percent of the index.Other than $3 million in salary and a $6 million target
bonus, Cook's compensation largely comprises a $376 million grant of restricted stock that was awarded when he succeeded Apple co-founder
Steve Jobs in 2011 and was meant to pay him for a decade
About one third of the grant is contingent on Apple outperforming the SP 500 Index
Cook's deputies each have annual target compensation of about $23 million, most of it in restricted stock.Alphabet, by contrast, handed the
head of its Google unit, Sundar Pichai, nine-figure pay packages for three straight years and gives biennial stock grants worth tens of
millions of dollars to senior executives
shareholders approved a pay package valued at $2.6 billion for Elon Musk last month
Facebook's billionaire operating chief, Sheryl Sandberg, collected $24.5 million in 2016
has endured years of investor criticism for awarding founder Larry Ellison and co-CEOs Safra Catz and Mark Hurd lavish compensation.The
absence of the uber wealthy at Apple partly reflects the firm's fractious history with Jobs, who owned a 15 percent stake in the company at
the time of its 1980 initial public offering
That holding would be valued at $132 billion today
But Jobs, who died in 2011, sold all but a single share of his then-$100 million stake after he was ousted from the company in 1985,
according to Walter Isaacson's 2011 biography
He had to rebuild his holdings from scratch when he returned more than a decade later.His widow, Laurene Powell Jobs, an entrepreneur and
founder of Emerson Collective, is the sole Apple representative on the wealth ranking
She's worth $18 billion with two-thirds of her wealth in Walt Disney Co
She doesn't work at Apple
Levinson, 68, has never appeared on an international wealth ranking
Apple didn't respond to requests for comment on the net worth of Levinson and Cook.Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak held a 7.9 percent stake
in 1980, which shrank over time as he sold options at low prices to mid-level employees and gifted shares to those he felt had been
His current stake isn't a matter of public record because only corporate insiders or shareholders with stakes exceeding 5 percent are
required to report their interests
But Wozniak's stake is thought to be in the millions rather than billions."Ownership is not something I think about," Wozniak said in an
email.The iPhone-maker also has been selective with acquisitions
Its largest deal, $3 billion for Beats Electronics in 2014, added hundreds of millions of dollars to the net worth of founders Dr
Dre and Jimmy Iovine, including more than $400 million of Apple shares that vest later this year
But that pales in comparison to Facebook's $22 billion purchase of WhatsApp that same year, which made the messenging service's co-founders,
Jan Koum and Brian Acton, instant billionaires
They have a combined net worth of $16 billion.It's possible a few billionaires are hiding in plain sight at Apple's Cupertino campus where a
stake of just 0.11 percent in the company is enough for a 10-figure fortune
That means long-time employees such as Chief Design Officer Jony Ive, a central figure for more than two decades, could own hefty positions,
though they're unlikely to differ materially from that of CEO Cook.(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by staff and is
published from a syndicated feed.)
