Meg Whitman Salary Raised To $1.5 Million By HP, Are US CEOs Overpaid?

Meg Whitman’s salary was just raised to $1.5 million as CEO of HP. But are United States CEOs getting paid too much for the work they do?

As previously reported by The Inquisitr, the data from experts seem to say that a $11.50 minimum wage would be a bit too high as a Federal minimum wage although it’s doable by some companies.

Americans workers ares scrambling just to get by nowadays. With the cost of living slowly beginning to strangle the poorest of Americans, some people are fairly sensitive to how much money the richest of the so-called one percent are making. For example, many were upset when some companies affected by the Wall Street bailout were giving raises to their CEOs, which some argued meant taxpayer money was funding their hefty paycheck.

Formerly CEO of eBay, Meg Whitman became HP’s CEO in September of 2011 and at first she was given a salary of only $1. Not $1 million, just $1. After revamping their product line HP’s $8.9 billion loss from earlier years transformed into a $1.4 billion gain in the fourth fiscal quarter of 2013.

Still, when people hear that HP CEO Meg Whitman went from $1 million to $1.5 million some eyebrows might raise a little. According to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Whitman’s salary was raised to be at “a competitive level among the salaries of the chief executive officers of HP’s peer companies.” But her performance bonuses and stock options is where the money is really being made. In 2012 these totaled up to $15.36 million and Meg Whitman’s net worth is estimated at $1.9 billion by Forbes magazine.

But even though the company’s stock has risen by 20 percent since Whitman took over the overall revenue has been declining. And the HP stock was dropped from the Dow Jones industrial average earlier this year. The only reason HP is back in the black is because they fired 30,000 American workers.

But is Meg Whitman overpaid? Forbes, for example, seems to think money managers are way overpaid but American CEOs are being paid fairly:

“These men are entrepreneurs, visionaries, creators of jobs. They deserve their annual haul. The rest, for the most part, are to be classified as merely managers, or caretakers of their shareholders’ property. Yet they, inexplicably, are compensated as if they were visionaries. This is wrong. This is what the Occupy Wall Street crowd should be railing against.”

Still, in 2011 the US CEOs of the 500 biggest companies were given a collective pay raise of 16 percent last year, to $5.2 billion, which amounts to about $10.5 million per person. Compare that lump sum with the three percent pay raise the average American worker is forced to deal with and you can see why there’s complaining. To put that number in perspective, the US inflation rate has actually been higher than three percent sometimes so it’s like we’re suffering a net loss in actual income.

Do you think US CEOs are overpaid? Is Meg Whitman’s salary just way too high considering her performance?