Steve Jobs, and his accompanying Reality Distortion Field cost Apple Computer just $1 in 2001. That's what Apple's CEO and co-founder took home as salary this year, according to Reuters.

Not that Jobs is short of a bob or two.

As part of a remuneration deal for saving Apple he was awarded a $90 million jet. In all, Jobs is worth $1.4 billion and ranks 158th, according to a typically drooling Forbes survey of America's plutocrats.

But his selfless gesture alone will do little to buck the trend of CEOs filling their pockets with the company's revenue. According to Business Week in the 1990s the ratio between a chief executive's salary, and the takehome pay of the typical, feckless, whining grunt on the shopfloor rose from 85:1 to 475:1. (In the UK, which is seeing a vigorous popular backlash against "fat cat" pay packets, the ratio is 24:1).

How fat do Stateside CEOs have to become before Americans decide that their CEOs' reward for massive overproduction, for leading the nation back into recession, and for wasting a decade's worth of capital investment on useless bubble economy speculation should be a custodial sentence, and not a financial reward?

We suspect we'll be waiting a long time for an answer to that one...®