Yahoo recently made the news for shelling out an estimated $27 million in cash and stocks to steal their new CEO, Scott Thompson, from his post at PayPal. That may seem like a lot of money for a corporate executive, even the top dog, but the sum doesn’t even hold a candle to what Apple CEO Tim Cook earned last year. With compensation that amounted to $378 million (in salary and stock), he not only blew other CEOs out of the water, he made more money than multiple corporations and even some countries. Although Twitter is a private company, and therefore not required to disclose their earnings (as a publicly traded company would have to), it is conservatively estimated that the social media entity earned close to $140 million last year, or a little more than a third of what Cook was paid (although some pundits posit that the number could be higher). He also beat out Rovio (creators of Angry Birds) and Eventbrite (the online ticketing agency). And he even earned more than the estimated gross domestic product of three countries (while tying the nation of Tonga for income). That makes him a very wealthy man indeed — we won’t soon see Tim Cook attending any Occupy rallies. Apparently he won’t follow in the footsteps of former Apple head Steve Jobs, though, who famously made his own salary $1 per year (yes, you read that right–
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