That’s the salary of Kinder Morgan CEO Richard Kinder.
The New York Times noted yesterday that:
Morningstar praised Mr. Kinder’s compensation. His salary is just $1 a year. His reward for a job well done? Dividends on his 24 million shares in the company; the payout was 75 cents each in the third quarter, or about $18 million. He recently bought another $1 million worth of shares; he has never sold a single one.
Joseph Nocera of the Times expanded the discussion on executive compensation this weekend (on Select $$) to the point of embarrassment:
Or take the last time the S.E.C. pushed through executive pay disclosure rules. “I was a consultant to Richard Breeden when the S.E.C. did its disclosure rules in the early 1990’s,” recalled Graef Crystal, the grand old man of executive compensation critics, referring to the S.E.C. chairman at the time. “I absolutely thought it would cause comp to go down because the disclosures would be so embarrassing. But it turned out that when somebody is hauling in $200 million, he’s not embarrassable.”
Mr. Kinder is clearly not in this camp. While his stock holdings are bolstered by the fact he is a founder, his compensation is well-aligned with the interests of other shareholders.
Mr. Kinder is also notable in that he is a lawyer, proving that smarter is also an admirable attribute for today’s CEO.
Tom Kirkendall described Kinder Morgan’s large investment in the Canadian energy sector last year.