EA Executives Won't Get Their Huge Bonuses
Electronic Arts was going to award great bonuses to its directors. They won't get them, though, as during a recent meeting, the shareholders refused to approve bonuses for Andrew Wilson, among others.
Two months ago, we wrote about the efforts of Activision Blizzard's investors against paying huge bonuses to the CEO Bobby Kotick. The action was blocked and it seemed that it would be no different with the July initiative of Electronic Arts' shareholders. Apparently, we were wrong. The report summarizing the company's investor meeting (via Seeking Alpha) mentions that 74% of the publisher's shareholders voted against rewarding company's directors.
Dissatisfied shareholders claimed that the company awards bonuses too often and without any correlation to company's actual performance. They were particularly concerned about the bonuses for Blake Jorgensen (Chief Financial Officer) and Kenneth Moss (Chief Technology Officer), but were also against the bonus for CEO Andrew Wilson. Prior to this meeting, the company intended to grant $21.37 million to Wilson, $19.5 million to Jorgensen, $14.2 million to Moss and $16.1 million to Laura Miele (Chief Studio Officer). For comparison (via Ars Technica): a year ago, the aforementioned board members received $18.3 million (Andrew Wilson), $9.41 million (Blake Jorgensen) and $6.95 million (Kenneth Moss and Laura Miele).
Apart from the discussion about the rightness of this decision, comparing it with the result of a similar initiative of Activision Blizzard shareholders is a bit bizarre. In both cases, the action was supervised by CtW Investment Group, which deals, among other things, with accounting directors for irresponsible and unethical corporate behavior. Funny thing is that Andrew Wilson's earnings in relation to the employees of Electronic Arts fall below the average for companies from the S&P 500 index (i.e. the 500 highest listed companies on the New York Stock Exchange). EA's CEO earns 218 times more than the median salary in the company, with an average of 264:1. Meanwhile, in the case of Bobby Kotick, the ratio is 319:1 (via AFL-CIO). The fact that it was the head of Activision Blizzard who managed to defend his bonus can be considered a bad joke. Another thing is that Kotick is not out the woods yet - Blizzard's employees are clearly fed up with such unequal pay.
