You know, we were really starting to get the shakes over here, because by our count it's been literally minutes since somebody in the press whined publicly about how Steve Jobs gets paid too much money. Ever since the Gulfstream jet, complaints about Steve's compensation have been a constant sort of background-noise thing, like living near the train tracks-- before long our conscious minds tuned it out, but our collective subconscious relies on the regularity of the noise to keep our internal clocks calibrated throughout the day. So when the media is suddenly devoid of pundits yapping about how Apple pays Steve way too much moolah for the job he does and the performance he turns in, it's like our brains have suddenly lost contact with the radio tower, and we plunge headlong into a nightmarish existence of chronological anarchy. We wind up eating breakfast at 5 PM and trying to tune into The Daily Show at 4:37 in the morning. It's not a pretty sight. Although the last time something like this happened, we did learn that at 4:30 AM, Comedy Central turns into the All-Girls Gone Wild-Infomercial channel. Who knew?

Anyway, it was faithful viewer Scott who pulled us back from the abyss by forwarding us a Business Wire release touting the San Francisco Business Times's new print article revealing "the Bay Area's most overpaid and underpaid CEOs." Guess who just happens to star in the very first sentence? That's right: "Apple Computer's Steve Jobs was among the most overpaid CEOs in the Bay Area in 2003." Not highest-paid, mind you; most overpaid. And not "the" most overpaid, either, which is sort of implied by his top billing in the announcement's introductory sentence, but merely "among" the most overpaid; from the context of statements further on we gather he's actually ranked fifth or something. Better luck next year, Steve!

Unfortunately, the full article isn't available online, and we readily admit that we haven't flown cross-country to pick up a copy of the issue in question, so we're ranting without all the facts at our disposal, but that's never stopped us before. That said, to us it seems slightly less than accurate to say Steve was paid $74.5 million last year when in reality he received $1 and five million shares of restricted stock. Why? Because for one thing, he can't touch that stock for three years, so his actual spendable paycheck last year was one measly buck. But more than that, it's the fact that those five million shares of stock were actually trade-ins for unexercised and worthless stock options he'd been paid in 2000 and 2001. In other words, when Steve finally has the ability to cash in those shares in 2006, he'll really be collecting his pay from 2000-2001, not 2003. Oh, and since the Business Times has no way of knowing what AAPL's price will be when Steve can finally sell (it's plummeted before-- believe us, we know), attributing a dollar value to the granted shares strikes us as a tad presumptuous.

Meanwhile, Steve's bestest buddy Larry Ellison "was among the most underpaid," which struck us as rather unlikely given the man's bank account and penchant for suits that cost more than the gross domestic product of Hong Kong. After reading a bit further, though, the pieces fell into place: similar to the way that Steve only gets a dollar per year in actual salary, Larry's paychecks from Oracle "only" total $59,165 for the year, but "the $40.5 million that Ellison took home from stock option sales wasn't counted as part of his 2003 compensation because his election to sell stock options was a personal investment choice not related to company compensation decisions."

Oh, great-- so when Steve got a dollar a year and stock options which he never exercised, the media counted those as employee compensation and said he was the highest-paid CEO in the country. But when Larry collects a salary of 59 grand and cashes in $40 million in options, those options somehow don't count. Why, we'd be at least mildly incensed by the double standard if it weren't the exact sort of anti-Steve media coverage we need to get our mental clocks wound back up.

Still, you just gotta love the attitude, right? After all, he may not be perfect, but is there anyone else on the face of the planet who could have hauled Apple back from the brink like Steve did? Does a jet and five million shares of restricted stock really constitute "overpayment" for a bona fide miracle? Because down here at AtAT we happen to be shareholders ourselves, so in the most tenuous sense that's our money they're paying Steve-- and every time we sit down at Mac OS X, or dial up a song on an iPod, or even check the current value of our AAPL holdings, we flash back to 1996 and realize we're getting Steve's services dirt cheap.

Then again, maybe we've just been RDFed to wit's end. But either way, we feel pretty good about it.