Verizon has axed another 6,600 jobs so far this year

Vonage CEO and Moe Greene lookalike Rory Read was made an offer he couldn’t refuse in late 2021 when Ericsson offered to buy the company he ran for $6.2 billion. Subsequent disclosures by the Swedish vendor showed Read was paid $32.76 million last year, possibly making him the top earner in telecom. The runners-up would likely include the bosses of the big US telcos whose mix of basic pay, cash bonuses and stock could fund small wars. AT&T’s John Stankey collected $22.9 million in 2022. Verizon’s Hans Vestberg wasn’t all that far behind on $19.8 million.

This is about 130 times as much as the average Verizon employee was paid the same year, the company reluctantly disclosed in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The pay-ratio gulf between Stankey and the median AT&T employee was even more outrageous at 219. For a point of international comparison, the UK’s BT pays soon-to-exit boss Philip Jansen about 77 times as much as someone in the median compensation range.

There is obviously nothing illegal about the largesse AT&T and Verizon bestow on their head honchos. It’s not as if the giant organizations and their shareholders would be much better off with CEOs on substantially lower salaries and bonus packages. Finding capable leaders would conceivably be harder if candidates could earn more at other huge corporations. Nevertheless, this disparity between the top execs and their underlings has never looked quite so obscene.

That’s partly because Stankey and Vestberg have been such depressing mediocrities in the management job, as reflected in the dwindling share prices of their firms. AT&T’s has dropped from $22.34 when Stankey became CEO in July 2020 to $14.32 today. Verizon’s is down from $57.09 in August 2018, the date of Vestberg’s elevation, to $33.44.

Stankey, an AT&T lifer who worked his way up the corporate ladder from shoeshine boy (if only – his LinkedIn profile indicates he has held “a variety of leadership roles” since 1985), bears much of the responsibility for AT&T’s catastrophic $85 billion splurge in 2018 on Time Warner, spun off just a few years later. The loss to AT&T was estimated at more than $40 billion. AT&T’s curious response was to promote Stankey.

Vestberg is most famous at Verizon for championing the 5G properties of millimeter wave spectrum, now widely discredited as an option for mass-market coverage. Before joining the US operator, he watched Ericsson fall behind Huawei in the mobile infrastructure market while he ran the Swedish vendor. Bribery and corruption were rife during his tenure, according to the US Department of Justice, which got round to fining Ericsson more than $1 billion years after Vestberg had left. He has never been implicated in the wrongdoing.

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