Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of Mario, is the second highest paid employee at Nintendo. This information comes from a report Nintendo has issued regarding the salaries and bonuses earned by their Representative Directors, a group of six top executives which includes Miyamoto.
How much did Miyamoto earn last year? His base salary for 2009 comes to about $678,000, which is about three times the average executive salary in Japan. Plus, he scored another $722,00 in bonuses. Not too shabby. Altogether, the representative directors took home over $8.8 million in salary and bonuses last year.
This is in contrast to say, Bobby Kotick, who reportedly accumulated nearly $15 million last year in salary, bonuses, options and other benefits.
I think there’s something sick in a culture that feels the need to make personal information regarding an individual’s annual income in the public domain. I’m certainly not above gasping in disgust when I discover how much the CEO of a corporation earns while employee pension plans are cut back. Nor am I above posting said information on a slow news day. I just wish we hadn’t reached a point where this sort of data is deemed important.
