Who is Facebook’s highest-paid executive? Sheryl Sandberg.
The Facebook COO received a base salary of just $300,000 last year, but Sandberg’s total comp turned out to be $30.8 million, according to Facebook’s pre-IPO filings. Meanwhile, her boss, CEO Mark Zuckerberg, got $500,000 in salary and some $1.5 million in total comp. (Don’t feel too sorry for Zuckerberg. The 27-year-old boss owns more than a quarter of the company he co-founded–a stake that could be worth $24 billion or more when Facebook goes public.)
As for Sandberg, whom I interviewed on stage at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit in October, her sweet pay may put to rest rumors that she could be tempted to leave Facebook, post-IPO, to try her hand at politics. “I have aspirations to do something that matters,” said Sandberg, No. 12 on Fortune‘s Most Powerful Women list, when I asked her about her political aspirations. “Right now, I don’t think there’s much I can do that would matter more than Facebook.” Having jumped from D.C. (where she was once chief of staff to Treasury Secretary Larry Summers) to McKinsey to Google to Facebook, she explained that her personal career strategy generally involves “kind of an 18-month plan” and she evaluates opportunities along the way.
So I would give Sandberg, 42, a year to evaluate how the Facebook IPO plays out. For now, working at Facebook is darn good financially for her. Based on Fortune‘s 2011 rankings of America’s highest-paid women, her $30.8 million would place her at No. 2 on the list, behind Oracle president and CFO Safra Catz.
Click here for the full transcript of my Summit interview with Sandberg.
