Activision CEO Bobby Kotick now one of America’s highest paid executives | Ars Technica

It's good to run the biggest video game company in the world—$64.9 million worth of good, to be precise. That's how much Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick made in 2012, according to a recent regulatory filing with the SEC.

The headline amount makes Kotick the second highest-paid CEO in the US for 2012, behind only Oracle CEO Larry Ellison (who made $96.2 million in 2012). But Kotick's number is a bit misleading, since the $64.9 million includes $55.9 million in stock options. That amount will actually be vested during the course of five years, even though regulatory rules require they all be counted for the 2012 filing.

Even spreading that stock award out, though, puts Kotick's 2012 compensation at more than $20 million. That's just a bit below the $20.5 million made by GE CEO Jeff Immelt, despite the fact that GE is roughly 14 times the size of Activision Blizzard. Activision Blizzard's filing says it aims to keep executive pay in the seventy-fifth percentile of comparable companies, but EA paid CEO John Riccitiello only $800,000 a year before he resigned last month.

"We don't like any element of this pay package," Nell Minow, a corporate-governance consultant at GMI Ratings, told Bloomberg in response to the news. "In the past we have expressed concern about this company and its compensation practices. The lack of information provided by the compensation committee is a red flag. It's very difficult to discern how they determined this compensation package from the information that's been provided."

The 50-year-old Kotick started as CEO at Activision in 1991, and he continued in the position after the company's merger with Blizzard in 2008. The firm's stock price has risen nearly 16-fold during this long tenure, though it is currently down a bit from record prices in mid-2008.