Xbox 360 | Activision CEO makes another $18 million

Bobby Kotick continues cashing out soon-to-expire stock options, bringing one-week windfall to nearly $42 million; CFO Thomas Tippl nets 40 percent raise.

Activision's Modern Warfare 2 brought in a whopping $550 million over its first five days on sale, setting a new entertainment industry record. Over roughly the same span, Activision CEO Bobby Kotick exercised millions of stock options he'd been sitting on for nearly a decade, bringing in roughly $42 million (closer to $38 million after deducting the options' strike price) over just four days.

Bobby Kotick made about 1/13th what Modern Warfare 2 did in the game's first five days on shelves.

After detailing the $22.2 million first round of Kotick's stock option sales last week, Activision filed another Securities and Exchange Commission report yesterday detailing the executive's further activities. On November 13, Kotick exercised another 1.69 million stock options at a strike price of $1.03 per share and sold them for between $11.60 and $11.70 per share. Kotick brought in roughly $19.67 million from the sales, clearing $17.93 million after deducting the $1.74 million needed to exercise the options in the first place. Both rounds of sales came from stock options that were set to expire April 18, 2010.

According to another Activision SEC filing, Kotick's total compensation for the last nine months of 2008 was $28.9 million, including a base salary of $743,000, a bonus of $5 million, and more than $11 million in stock awards. For the entirety of 2009, Kotick's base salary will total $950,000, as the executive elected to forgo a salary increase.

One Activision employee who isn't forgoing a bump in pay is CFO Thomas Tippl. The Austrian-born executive is receiving a 40 percent bump in pay for 2009, increasing his base salary from $535,000 to $750,000. Like Kotick, Tippl gets most of his compensation from other sources. For the last nine months of 2008, Tippl's base salary was $387,731, but bonuses, stock awards, and other perks brought his total compensation to $3.23 million.

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Source: http://www.gamespot.com/xbox360/action/modernwarfare2/news.html?sid=6240632