Mark Zuckerberg Was The Highest Paid US CEO Of 2012

Mark Zuckerberg was by far the highest paid public CEO in the United States last year, a new report has shown.

According to GMI Ratings, the Facebook CEO's total compensation for 2012 was nearly $2.3 billion, more than twice that of the next-highest paid CEO, which analysed compensation for more than 2,000 CEOs of publicly traded companies.

Almost all of Zuckerberg's compensation for the year comes from income related to Facebook's IPO.

On the day Facebook went public, Zuckerberg exercised 60 million stock options worth nearly $2.3 billion.

Richard Kinder, CEO of energy company Kinder Morgan, was second on the list with a total compensation of $1.1 billion. Other tech execs cracked the top 10 list as well, including Apple CEO Tim Cook (with $143 million) and Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff (with $109 million).