Apple’s boss scooped payout of almost $100m last year

Apple’s boss scooped a payout of almost $100m last year as he celebrated his tenth anniversary in charge. 

Tim Cook bagged $98.7m, or £72.9m, in 2021 – six times his pay the year before. 

The iPhone maker revealed the eye-watering sum in a regulatory filing just days after it became the world’s first ever company to hit a stock market value of $3trillion. 

Shares have soared over the last year as more people turned to technology during the pandemic and Apple created iPhones with the capacity to run on 5G mobile net works. Cook’s base salary of £2.2m was unchanged. Most of his pay came through shares in Apple he was given as he entered into a long-term incentive plan. 

He will be able to start cashing in the shares between 2023 and 2025 – giving him a reason to remain at the company for at least another three years. The 61-year-old joined Apple in 1998 and took over as chief executive from co-founder Steve Jobs shortly before his death in 2011. 

During Cook’s decade in charge, Apple’s shares have shot up more than 1100 per cent. But some critics have raised concerns that he lacks the creative vision of his predecessor and has yet to come up with a truly innovative new product. And the firm has also come under fire over its tax structure, as it has kept billions of dollars of profits in Irish subsidiaries to reduce its tax bill. 

Cook, who became the first openly gay chief executive on the Fortune 500 list of America’s largest companies, has previously said he plans to donate most of his wealth to philanthropic causes. Under his leadership, Apple has become more generous with its donations and has handed tens of millions of pounds of its shares to charities.