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Long, Tall Texan
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Business New Haven
6/24/2002
By: BNH
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In an article headlined “Heads I Win, Tails I Win,” the June 9 New York Times Magazine made SBC/SNET CEO Edward E. Whitacre Jr. its poster boy for executive compensation spun out of control. Noting that his is not, relatively speaking, a “compensation horror story” a la WorldCom or Enron, author Roger Lowenstein reported that Whitacre's ever-sweeter deals “exemplif[y] how the [executive compensation] system itself is shot through with hypocrisy…His collected proxies offer a view of the system's gradual corruption.”
For example, four years after taking the SBC helm, Whitacre in 1994 received $4.4 million is salary and more than 160,000 stock options, even though his company's stock price was flat that year. By 2001 - following three consecutive years during which SBC's share price fell - the Texan received a grant of 3.6 million options, pushing his total annual pay package past $80 million.
An SBC spokesperson responded that Whitacre had done a good job and that his compensation was not “off the reservation.”
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