CtW Investment Group Unimpressed by Bobby Kotick's Reduced Salary

Back in April of this year, Activision-Blizzard decided that their famously overpaid CEO, Bobby Kotick, was just a little too overpaid: thus, he volunteered himself for a 50% pay cut, and for a reduction on some of the many, many bonuses that add up to millions of dollars every year. Presumably, this move was less because Activison-Blizzard needed money (they’ve been raking it in every year) and more because the enormous disparity in pay was starting to cause problems within the company: people haven’t made much of a secret of how much they disliked how much he was getting paid, after all.

Well, according to the lovely folks at the CtW Investment Group, who were the first major figures within Activision-Blizzard to protest his swollen paycheck, these cuts aren’t enough, as Bobby Kotick is still raking in significantly more dough than he deserves.

From a publicly released statement:
 

...The extension is not long enough to represent an earnest effort by the Compensation Committee to reduce the CEO’soutsized equity pay over a sustained period.The Compensation Committee is silent about its long-term incentive approach after March 2023.

Further, the substantial payouts for Mr. Kotick’s 2020 and 2021 awards alone are so large that they severely undermine the contractual reductions that apply largely to 2022. Mr.Kotick has already received a windfall sufficiently large enough to cover reductions in pay through early 2023 because of the Shareholder Value Creation Incentive.

They do the math in the actual statement, but the summary is this: the salary reduction won’t last long enough to be important, and he’s already earned so much phat stacks from other means that even a 50% pay reduction is functionally meaningless.

I very much doubt this statement will amount to much — rich dude’s are gonna stay rich — but at least it undermines the intended effect of these pay cuts. We should always dislike and distrust Activision-Blizzard. And it’s nice to be reminded why, sometimes.