Tao Francis

How far are you willing to go to acquire Greenland?

You'll find out.

I think that really sparked this trend.

I mean, it was after that that a number of other companies came in with really similar structures.

What really distinguishes these is that they're valued really highly to begin with, but they have the potential to really balloon.

And that's because they're tied to performance targets for the company.

Often these are stock price or market capitalization targets.

So it's a combination of a big market

award, a longer time period, often these are five to 10 years in duration, and then also this potential for these performance targets to really get a lot bigger.

Some of these are startups.

And one of the things that startups have is a lot of leeway from investors in setting pay packages.

And founders also often have concerns

bigger or more unusual pay packages.

We're talking about a relatively small number of companies.

Over this two-year period, there were about 20 companies that adopted this kind of nine-figure swing-for-the-fences pay package.

It's a mixed bag because you can't just point to one set of results, right?

You have about 10 of these companies where we don't really get an answer.

That is, the executive either stepped down from the CEO role, or the company was acquired, or in one case, the company went bankrupt.

So there's four CEOs at three companies.

KKR has co-CEOs that have completed their contracts.