What Your Wall Street CEO Is Really Worth

What Your Wall Street CEO Is Really Worth

Louis XIV famously said, "L'etat, c'est moi," letting everyone know his centrality in France. Bruce Wasserstein needs no such pithy quotes to broadcast his dominance over Lazard: just look at his compensation-which, at $41 million, is more than one-quarter of the advisory firm's full-year 2007 profit of $155 million.

Is anyone else on Wall Street worth that much? Deal Journal took a look at how much Wall Street CEOs took in last year, expressed as a percentage of net income their firms produced last year. And the CEOs can thank Le Wasserstein for actually making them look underpaid.

Here are a few other Street stalwarts, ranked in order. All of them fall well below Wasserstein's take, when measured as a percentage of net income.

2. Richard Fuld of Lehman Brothers, with a $40.1 million pay package, took home the equivalent of about 1% of his firm's $4.1 billion in net income-a price shareholders may be happy to pay to avoid the Writedown Ebola going around.

3. Lloyd Blankfein, for instance, received a $67.9 million compensation package that is only 0.5% of Goldman's $11.59 billion of net income in 2007.

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