It pays to be an executive in one of the hottest industries on the planet. Very well, in fact. Fierce Wireless has compiled a list of the top 10 highest paid CEOs in the wireless industry in 2013, featuring many familiar faces, but leaving out some of the biggest names in the wireless world. As for notable omissions, Tim Cook didn’t rank among the top 10 for the first time in several years, and Stephen Elop disappeared as well. T-Mobile CEO John Legere is also absent from the list, but T-Mobile has yet to announce executive compensation for last year.
The list of those who did make the cut is as follows:
- Sprint CEO Dan Hesse
- AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson
- Former BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins
- Qualcomm Executive Chairman Paul Jacobs
- Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt
- Verizon Communications CEO Lowell McAdam
- Qualcomm CEO Steve Mollenkopf
- Motorola Solutions CEO Greg Brown
- Intel CEO Brian Krzanich
- Sprint CFO Joe Euteneuer
That’s right — Sprint managed to bookend the list, thanks in large part to SoftBank’s $21.6 billion cash and stock merger bid for an 80% stake in Sprint, as well as the death of Nextel and the introduction of the LTE Sprint Spark service. Hesse subsequently raked in over $49 million along with plenty of Sprint stock as his employment contract was extended to 2018.
The compensation drops precipitously after Hesse, as AT&T’s Randall Stephenson took home $23 million, BlackBerry’s Thorsten Heins came away with approximately $22 million and Qualcomm’s Paul Jacobs brought in $20 million.
You can see how this year’s list compares to the list from 2012 over at Fierce Wireless.
