Original title: apple ranks first in the world in terms of market value, but few employees become billionaires
According to foreign media reports, apple ranks among the most valuable companies in the world with a market value of about 879 billion US dollars. On the contrary, its internal employees are not as rich as people think, and there are not many billionaires in the company.
It's not hard to find a billionaire in Silicon Valley. Both Arash ferdowsi of Dropbox and Peter Gassner of veeva systems have more than $1 billion in total assets this year. The technology industry as a whole accounts for one-fifth of the total number of billionaires in the index, totaling about $1 trillion.
Although Apple's market value has reached $879 billion, making it the most valuable company in the world, it is not easy to find out Apple's billionaires.
According to the company's regulatory filings, art Levinson, Apple's chairman, is the only documented Apple Internal billionaire, but Apple shares account for only 20% of its $1 billion assets, and the rest of its wealth is due to his long tenure at Genentech. It is reported that Levinson is the chairman and CEO of Genentech, and holds an early stake in Google.
Moreover, no other apple insiders have wealth close to that. Tim Cook, chief executive, has a fortune of $600 million, reflecting that Apple's compensation plans are limited relative to the size and performance of the company.
A complete bargain
According to the data statistics of the top paid executives of Listed Companies in the United States, the salary level of Apple executives is relatively low. Apple's executive compensation relative to the company's economic profit ratio is also the lowest in the top 200 executive compensation.
This led to relatively few internal holdings. This highlights the fact that apple, based in Cupertino, California, has created a small number of billionaires since its recovery from bankruptcy in 1997.
'Apple has recovered from near death, and the cards have been messed up,' says gene Munster, co-founder of Loup ventures and a longtime Apple observer. 'there's no more of that very centralized ownership. '
This makes it different from other technology giants. Often, the founders of other technology companies and a small number of veteran employees account for an increasing proportion of the index.
They include Jeff Bezos of Amazon; Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Eric Schmidt of alphabet; Bill Gates of Microsoft; Mark Zuckerberg and Jan koum of Facebook. The wealth associated with these billionaires accounts for about 10% of the index.
In addition to his $3 million daily salary and $6 million target bonus, cook's salary is mainly a $376 million restricted stock award, which he successfully obtained from Apple co-founder Steve middot in 2011; When Steve Jobs took over the company successfully, he received the award, which was paid within 10 years. About a third of the restricted stock award depends on whether Apple can beat the standard & Poor's 500 index. Cook's deputies are each targeted to earn about $23 million a year, most of it in restricted stock.
In contrast, for three years in a row, alphabet has paid nine figure salaries to its head of Google, Sundar Pichai, and paid tens of millions of dollars in two-year stock grants to Google executives. Tesla's shareholders last month approved CEO Elon Musk's compensation package, worth about $2.6 billion. Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer, had revenue of $24.5 million in 2016. Oracle has received criticism from investors for years that it has been generous to founder Larry Ellison and co CEOs safra Catz and Mark Hurd.
The lack of super rich within Apple partly reflects the company's unhappy history with jobs. When Apple went public in 1980, jobs owned 15% of the company, and today it will be worth $132 billion. But according to Walter Isaacson's biography of jobs, published in 2011, when jobs was driven out of the company in 1985, all his shares were sold for only $100 million. When he returned to apple more than a decade later, he had to rebuild his fortune.
His widow, laurene Powell jobs, is also an entrepreneur, the founder of Emerson group and the only representative of apple on the world's fortune list. She's worth $18 billion and two-thirds of her wealth comes from Walt Disney and other holding companies, but she doesn't work for apple. Levinson, 68, has never been on the world wealth list. Apple did not respond to requests for comments on Levinson and cook's net worth.
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak owned 7.9% of the company in 1980. As time went on, he sold stock options to middle-level employees at a low price, and sold some stocks when they didn't look good. The number of shares Wozniak currently holds in the company is not known because only insiders or shareholders holding more than 5% of the shares need to disclose information. But it is speculated that Wozniak's shares are worth about millions of dollars rather than billions.
'ownership is not what I think,' Wozniak said in an email.
Apple is selective in acquiring other companies. Its biggest deal was a $3 billion acquisition of beats electronics in 2014, which added hundreds of millions of dollars to the net worth of founders Dr. DRE and Jimmy Iovine, including Apple shares worth more than $400 million granted to them later this year. But that's dwarfed by Facebook's $22 billion acquisition of WhatsApp. The acquisition has turned WhatsApp co founders Jan koum and Brian Acton into billionaires. Their net assets now total $16 billion.
In Apple's Cupertino Park, there may be a few billionaires hiding in a humble corner. At Apple, just 0.11% of the stock is worth 10 digits. This means that long-term employees like Jony ive, chief design officer, may have huge wealth, although he is very different from cook, chief executive. (Han Bing)