EA Investors Shoot Down Unfair Executive Compensation Package

As of late, we’ve been keeping an eye on the activities of one CtW Investment Group, a conglomerate of conscious investors who have made it their mission to at least slow down the rampant overpaying of video game executives who clearly haven’t earned their enormous paychecks. At first, they tried to put the breaks on Activision-Blizzard, who has one of the most overpaid CEO’s in America, but that effort unfortunately didn’t pan out. Following that failure, they set their sights on EA last July, who also has a nasty habit of overpaying certain executives, specifically CFO Blake Jorgensen and CTO Kenneth Moss, who CtW were able to prove were being overpaid for the amount of value they brought the company.

We all expected this to fail like their efforts with Activision-Blizzard, and yet, in spite of everything 2020 would lead you to expect… that’s not what happened.

As according to Bloomberg, investors put their foot down and actually shot down a proposed executive remuneration proposal, voting 171 million to 60 million. This puts EA among the 2.2 percent of other top 3000 US companies who have also decided to maybe stop overpaying an underperforming executive class.

Word is, they specifically had a problem with rewarding executives with secondary stock awards before initial stock awards were even earned, which basically meant executives could earn big money regardless of how their company actually performed – or worse, sell those stocks early if they expected that things would take a downwards turn. That’s certainly something CtW took issue with, and they likely used it as a rallying point for the investors when they cast their vote.

I wouldn’t call this a paradigm shift, since it only affects EA, and I wouldn’t give EA any karma points for it either, since it wasn’t them who ultimately voted down the plan. But it is… good. An isolated, nice thing to read about. And I’ll take that any day of the week.