Happy Sunday, I'm William D. Cohan.

Welcome back to Dry Powder, and thanks as always for following our work here at Puck. Today, my thoughts the great questions of our time on Wall Street: What is Ari Emanuel really worth? Wouldn't we all be better off with Larry Summers running the Fed? And what is Warren Buffett secretly up to?

As a reminder, you're receiving the free version of Dry Powder at . To read my entire column, and for access to all of my colleagues at Puck, you can purchase a full subscription here. 

Thanks,

Bill

Ari’s Comp and Warren Buffett’s Wink

Musings on the questions of our time on Wall Street: What is Ari Emanuel really worth? Can the Fed protect us from a post-plague recession? And what is Warren Buffett secretly up to?

Leave it to Ari Emanuel, the founder and head of the newly-public Endeavor Group Holdings, to get the headlines for being the highest-paid executive in Hollywood last year, with a total package clocking in at $308 million, most of which is a long-term equity grant that only has value if Emanuel supercharges the Endeavor stock price. That’s probably exactly what he wanted. But Ari is hardly the only mediaco C.E.O. making bank. David Zaslav made nearly $247 million last year, a figure that is also tied heavily to stock performance. Bobby Kotick made more than $150 million (and will make plenty more once the Microsoft acquisition of Activision goes through). 2021 will likely be remembered on Wall Street as the peak of a financial bubble that will take years to unwind.

Of course, ridiculous levels of compensation, however complex their structure, aren’t limited to Hollywood C.E.O.s. Loyal readers know that I’ve been appalled by Larry Culp’s $120 million stock award gambit at GE, perhaps the most egregious example of corporate greed to come down the pike in a long while. After all, Culp helped himself to the stock award by getting the GE board of directors to reset the bar lower for him when the getting was good in August 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, despite the fact that the GE stock price hasn’t budged during his more than three years at the helm of the company. 

Executive compensation has always been a bit of a black box. Board of directors often rely on outside compensation consultants who “benchmark” pay across industries, slowly but surely raising the level of pay for executives and then claiming that the pay is in line with others in the same industry. It’s a virtuous cycle for everyone but shareholders...

FOUR STORIES WE'RE TALKING ABOUT