Apple CEO Steve Jobs Drops from Top to Bottom Rank

Forbes has released its yearly ranking of top-paid CEOs, with Steve Jobs dropping from No 1 to No 120 in Forbes‘ list of the U.S. highest-paid CEOs. Jobs doesn’t even make the list of the tech’s top 10 top-paid CEOs.

Jobs’ estimated compensation in 2006 was a whopping $646 million, but Apple accountants have found a way to reduce 2007 compensation figures to unrealistic $14.6 million (the figure includes price change and dividends). To put figures into perspective, Jobs’ compensation dropped 97.7% of what he received in 2006.

This is not the first time Jobs ranked low. In April, TIME asked who people thought should be on the list of the 100 most influential people of the year. Steve Jobs was ranked 174th with only 66,304 votes.

Although Apple’s founder takes a token salary of $1 - and millions of dollars in perks - the company suffered embarrassment over the improper pricing of share options which prompted a criminal investigation and a public apology from Jobs in 2006.

Back in March, at the company’s annual shareholders meeting in Cupertino, Apple shareholders approved a proposal giving them the opportunity to tell the company what they think about how much its executives, including CEO Steve Jobs, are being paid. The non-binding resolution called on Apple to put its pay policies to an annual vote - a procedure introduced in Britain five years ago.

Jobs’ private plane costs have been frequent targets of criticism. As an example, Apple’s 10K filing for the 2007 fiscal year reports that during that year, Apple reimbursed jobs for $776,000 in plane expenses. In 2006 it was $202,000. In 2005 it was $1.1 million, or about $275,000 per quarter. The cost of a Turbo-Jet engine aircraft, named N2N, was $43.5 million alone. That’s a lot of money, especially when it comes from shareholder’s pockets.

However, to Steve Jobs credit, Apple is one of the most efficient companies in terms of return on investment, delivering 99.3% in fiscal year 2007. Therefore, most of us would agree that Jobs is still the best man for the job!

Here is a list of the 12 top-paid technology CEOs according to Forbes:

1. Larry Ellison, Oracle: $192.9 million
2. Nabeeb Gareel, MEMC Electronic Materials: $79.6 million
3. John Chambers, Cisco: $54.8 million
4. Mark Hurd, HP: $27.6 million
5. Jen-Hsun Huang, NVIDIA: $24.6 million
6. Samual Palmisano, IBM: $24.3 million
7. Wendell Weeks, Corning: $22.6 million
8. Joseph Tucci, EMC: $20 million
9. William Sullivan, Agilent: $17.4 million
10. Paul Otellini, Intel: $16.3 million
11. Steve Jobs, Apple: $14.6 million
12. Jonathan Schwartz, Sun: $13.5 million

Forbes compiled the list by calculating the overall compensation for the past year for executives, factoring in salary, cash bonuses, vested stock grants, stock gains and exercised stock options.