Amgen CEO again tops list of region’s highest paid execs
Robert Bradway remained the highest paid executive in the Tri-Counties in 2020, but stock options and new faces changed a lot of the names and positions on the list.
Bradway, the CEO of Amgen, earned $20.13 million in total compensation in 2020 — 3% more than he earned in 2019, and 8.23% more than in 2018. His base pay only increased $500,000, while most of the increase in his salary came from stock options. In 2018, his stock options were worth $12.5 million, but in 2020, they were worth $14.4 million.
Amgen’s value has also risen during that time. On Jan. 1, 2019, the company’s stock price was $187.11, and on the same day three years later, it was valued at $241.43 — an increase of almost 30%.
Amgen executives made up half of the top 10 highest paid executives at publicly traded companies in the tri-county region in 2020.
Murdo Gordon, Amgen’s executive vice president of global commercial operations, was the fifth highest paid executive on the list, a decline from previous years, when he was second only to Bradway. In 2018, Gordon earned $14.1 million in total compensation, with a bulk of that coming from his stock options, which were valued at $9.9 million. In 2020, his stock options were worth less than half of that, at $4.1 million, and his total compensation was $7 million.
Gordon’s base salary increased significantly in that time, from $330,769 in 2018 to more than $1 million in 2020.
In 2018, Anthony Hooper, David Meline and Sean Harper, all executive vice presidents at Amgen, took sixth, seventh and eighth places, respectively. Hooper was an executive vice president of global commercial operations, Meline was the CFO and Harper was the executive vice president of research and development. They all earned between $6.8 and $7.1 million.
Two years later, none of those names were on the list of highest paid executives. At Amgen, they were replaced by David Reese, the current executive vice president of research and development, who was the seventh highest paid executive in the region at $6.81 million in 2020. David Scott, the executive vice president of operations, took ninth place with total compensation of $6.59 million, and Peter Griffith, Amgen’s new CFO, earned $5.29 million to place tenth in the region.
The executive in the region whose pay rose the most was David Spector, the chairman and CEO of PennyMac Financial Services. In 2018, Spector earned $5.8 million in total compensation, and was the 12th highest paid executive. In 2020, he was the third highest, with total compensation of $12.38 million.
His base pay rose from $750,000 to $1 million in that time, while his non-equity compensation and stock options made up most of the gains. Spector had $2.1 million worth of stock options in 2018, and $4.89 million in options in 2020. Additionally, his non-equity compensation went from $2.9 million in 2018 to $6.4 million a few years later.
Jeff Green, the CEO of the Ventura-based advertising technology company The Trade Desk, also had a significant increase in compensation. In 2018, he was the third highest-paid executive, earning $10.8 million on an $800,000 base salary. In 2020, he received $15.93 million in total compensation, with a base salary of $900,000.
Most of the increase was attributable to stock options. In 2018, Green’s stock options were worth $7.7 million of his $10.8 million in compensation, and in 2020, stock options contributed $12.92 million of his $15.93 million in total compensation. During that time, The Trade Desk’s stock price rose from $117.92 to $795.81, an increase of almost 575%.
