No Surprise Here: Ellison Among Best-Paid CEOs at $68M

This is not what anyone would call big IT news, but when specific numbers become available on items like this, we suppose it’s good to have for the record.

Billionaire Oracle CEO and co-founder Larry Ellison was listed Nov. 15 as the world’s second-highest-paid business leader, according to The Wall Street Journal’s latest CEO pay survey. The research includes 456 of the largest U.S. public companies.

The survey included companies with annual revenue of more than $4 billion that filed proxies between Oct. 1, 2009, and Sept. 30, 2010.

Ellison earned $68.6 million in compensation that mainly consisted of options valued at $61.9 million, the WSJ said. He was ranked behind Gregory B. Maffei, CEO of Liberty Mutual Corp., who pulled down direct pretax compensation of $87.1 million last year.

Sigh. Ellison — who, according to Forbes, is the sixth-richest person on Earth with more than $27 billion (as of March 10, 2010) — probably looks at that 68 million bucks and says, “So what’s for lunch today?”

Must be nice. Actually, according to the same source, Ellison made more than $84 million in 2008.

Must be even nicer.

How about a little perspective here? The following analogy will give you an idea of what we’re talking about — especially for football fans.

Say that Ellison’s $27 billion is represented by the full 100 yards on a football field. In comparison, $68 million — a ton of money for 99.999 percent of people in the world — would represent the 4-yard line.

See what we mean?