HP's Fiorina lands $90m in shares and stock options

This is greedy. Carly Fiorina, HP's new hotshot CEO, is to receive stock and options worth up to $90 million, as part of her pay package. HP is to dole out the shares over a four-year period. We can assume there's some performance-related hurdle to overcome. Ex-Lucent exec Fiorina also gets $1 million annual salary and an annual bonus of between $1.25 million and $3.75 million. Boy, she must be really, really good to warrant that kind of pay packet. Or maybe it reflects the scarcity value of Fortune 500 IT company CEO material that can play well with Wall Street. HP shares underperformed its competitors over the last two years, so Fiorina simply has to play catch-up to "earn" a vast fortune. Let's get one thing straight. Entrepreneur Fiorina ain't. She joins a vast and successful company which needs only a little fixing. Her "compensation agreement" represents a straightforward transfer of capital from shareholders outside HP to a hard-negotiating company insider. It also shows that HP's executive compensation committee lives in a bubble entirely disconnected from the real world. ®