Facebook's CEO breaks pay record

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was paid more than US$2.278 billion in total compensation in 2012.

According to the latest report by GMI Ratings, Zuckerberg's salary of US$503,000 and bonus of US$266,000 were totally eclipsed by stock options worth around US$2.27 billion.

GMI said Zuckerberg exercised 60 million stock options, granted in 2005 and fully vested by 2010, at a strike price of just six cents.

When Facebook went public in May 2012, Mr Zuckerberg's worth vaulted by more than US$2.7 billion dollars on the difference.

This was the first year the report found any CEO to have collected more than US$1 billion, however, one other CEO's total compensation topped this amount - Richard Kinder, chief of energy company Kinder Morgan, who was paid a salary of just US$1 but given stock worth more than US$1.1 billion.

The third highest paid CEO was Mel Karmazin, Sirius XM Radio's CEO, who earned US$225 million.

In fourth place was Liberty Media's Gregory Maffei with a compensation package of US$254 million, followed by Apple's Tim Cook with US$143 million.

In the survey of 2,259 North American publicly traded companies, the GMI reported found pay increased a median of 8.47%

"In the more than ten years that GMI has been publishing this report, I've never seen a top ten highest paid list that loomed this large," said Greg Ruel, author of the report.

"While the companies in this year's list have performed well over the past three and five year periods in terms of shareholder return, generally speaking, it's the sheer size and volume of equity awards granted to these top executives that catapults their total compensation to astronomical levels."