The following story is true: The names have been withheld to protect those involved from any further embarrassment.
💵💰Don’t miss the move: Subscribe to TheStreet’s free daily newsletter 💰💵
Executive perks are a key part of the business world. You want to attract or retain the top people at your company, you’re expected to crack open your wallet and make it rain.
“To be successful, companies need to attract and reward leaders who create value over the long term, but executive remuneration often focuses on short-term targets,” Harvard Law School’s Forum on Corporate Governance said in a 2023 study.
“It’s no surprise that executive remuneration stands out as one of the most visible and closely examined aspects of a publicly listed company’s corporate governance program,” the report noted.
A closer examination of executive perks will turn up some real whoppers.
You’ll find tales of $2 million birthday parties for the CEO, a corporate jet employed to take the top executive’s daughter to high school, and the head honcho having company employees clean his home and mow his lawn.
And then — answering the existential question “are there perks after death?” — one executive had the mother of all noncompete clauses, which saw him or his heirs paid $15 million to keep him from competing after he left the company — even if he died.
2025 stock market forecasts
Manoj Bhargava has seen his share of wacky corporate behavior.
The billionaire philanthropist and corporate executive, who founded 5-hour Energy drinks, described one particularly nutty tale in his podcast The Business of Everything With Manoj.
“There was this big insurance company,” he said. “This guy got assigned to an office and he was at a level where you got wall-to-wall carpeting; he got brand new everything. Then they moved him to another office. So, then a new guy got his office.”
No big deal, right? Just a little bit of executive shuffling to make sure everybody’s in the right place. But there was a slight problem.
It seems that the incoming executive was not at the proper level and thus did not rate an office with wall-to-wall carpeting. What’s a company to do?
We’ll let Bhargava tell you.
“They cut a foot all the way around the carpet because he doesn’t qualify for wall-to-wall carpeting,” he said.
