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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 13331

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

 

Publication type: news

Huckman M.
J&J, Merck & Wyeth Tops in Big Pharma CEO Pay
CNBC.com 2008 Mar 25
http://www.cnbc.com/id/23793959/site/14081545?__source=yahoo|headline|quote|text|&par=yahoo


Notes:

Links to information on company stocks removed from this article.


Full text:

As proxy statements pop up on www.sec.gov, investors can get a peek at who’s making what. When you go to the web site, click on “Search for company filings,” then click on “Companies and other filers,” enter the ticker symbol, click on “Find companies” and then open up the “14A” or proxy statement.

So far, all of the American big pharmas have filed except for Schering-Plough. The figures I’m using are from the “Total Compensation” tables, so everything (base salary, bonuses, stock, etc.) and the kitchen sink are thrown in.

Even though it’s kind of a hybrid pharma/medicaldevice/consumer products company and not a pure-play drug company, Johnson & Johnson’s Bill Weldon is king of the hill. His total compensation last year was nearly $32 million, up from $28.5 million in 2006.

Recently retired Wyeth chief Bob Essner came in second, despite the fact he took a pay cut during what was a not-so-good year for WYE. He took home $24.1 million, down from $32.8 million the year before. And his successor, Bernard Poussot, pocketed $12.6 million, nearly $2 million less than he got in ’06.

Merck’s Dick Clark, who talks about the company’s recent stock performance and upcoming catalysts in today’s Wall Street Journal nearly doubled his compensation. In 2006, Clark made $10.2 million and last year the company paid him nearly $20 million.

Eli Lilly also gave its top-two execs a pay cut last year. Sidney Taurel, who is retiring next week, made $13 million, a more than $2 million drop from 2006. And his successor, COO John Lechleiter, also saw his pay shrink by $2 million to $9.3 million.

After being named the permanent head of Bristol-Myers Squibb, Jim Cornelius got the biggest raise of his peers. He went from nearly $1.5 million in ’06 to $11.3 million last year. The company stopped paying for his $25,500 monthly rent plus utilities on his Manhattan apartment last September and revealed it had picked up the tab for $85,000 in private jet fees while Cornelius was interim CEO so he could commute from his home to Bristol HQ in New York.

And then there’s Pfizer’s Jeff Kindler. His total compensation saw a slight pullback from $9.7 million in 2006 to $9.5 million in ’07. But, the board raised his base salary by $150,000 and gave him a bonus last year equal to 212 percent of his base. In dollars, that equates to a $3.1 million bonus, but the board could have given him as much as $4.3 million extra.

 

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Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909