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CEO of beleaguered HP made $15.4M last year

Meg Whitman pulled in $15.4 million in compensation during fiscal 2012, with a base salary of just a single dollar but a performance-based bonus of $1.7 million.

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Edward Moyer is a senior editor at CNET and a many-year veteran of the writing and editing world. He enjoys taking sentences apart and putting them back together. He also likes making them from scratch. ¶ For nearly a quarter of a century, he's edited and written stories about various aspects of the technology world, from the US National Security Agency's controversial spying techniques to historic NASA space missions to 3D-printed works of fine art. Before that, he wrote about movies, musicians, artists and subcultures.
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Meg Whitman, CEO of the struggling Hewlett-Packard, pulled in $15.4 million in compensation during fiscal 2012.

Her base salary may have been only $1, but, as reported by Reuters (which cited an HP filing made yesterday with the SEC), the former eBay chief and onetime California gubernatorial candidate was awarded a bonus of $1.7 million, along with stock options and the like valued at more than $13 million (most of which haven't yet vested).

The bonus was awarded under HP's "Pay for Results" plan, which considers performance benchmarks including revenue, free-cash flow, and achievement of management-by-objective goals, as noted by AllThingsD's Arik Hesseldahl.

HP, a onetime figurehead for Silicon Valley's can-do startup culture, is reeling from a long and startling run of bad news, from corporate spying scandals to jettisoned CEOs to extremely costly acquisitions. And a blizzard of criticism has befallen the company as a result, including calls to break up HP and talk in the press about Whitman's days being numbered.

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During HP's fourth-quarter earnings call last November, Whitman spoke of a "return to greatness" for the company based on great products. And a recent article in Businessweek quoted her as saying that she answers queries about her turnaround time-frame by saying it'll take her "five years" to get HP back on its feet, and that "Some people don't like that answer."

Whitman was appointed CEO of HP a little more than a year ago.