Bill Ford Makes $20 Million as Company Stumbles

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Apr 3, 6:25AM EDT

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Bill Ford Makes $20 Million as Company Stumbles — © Toa55 / iStock via Getty Images

Bill Ford, also known as William Clay Ford Jr., made $20,613,100 last year, although Ford Motor Co. (NYSE: F) stumbled. Ford’s executive chair is the de facto chief executive officer because his family holds voting control of the company. The person with the chief executive title, President and CEO Jim Farley, essentially works for Bill Ford. James D. Farley Jr. made $26,470,033. Ford’s proxy showed that Farley made 312 times more than the median pay of a Ford worker. That means, if the compensation of both men is taken together, the figure would be closer to 600 to 1.

Ford’s shares went sideways last year. They started the year trading at about $12 and ended the year at the same level. The S&P 500 rose 24% over the same period. (Bull, base, and bear Ford stock price predictions for 2030.)

Ford could be judged on several metrics from 2023, but the market primarily evaluates Ford on its electric vehicle (EV) business. Bill Ford once said that the launch of the F-150 Lightning, Ford’s EV flagship, was the most important launch of his career. The company changed the price of the Lightning at least four times. Sales were far below expectations. Ford then pulled the plug on some of the Lightning’s production capacity and said the markets for EVs were not as strong as it had expected.

Bill Ford’s net worth has been pegged at over $1 billion. Given his company’s failure with EVs, after describing them as Ford’s future, it should have been enough for him to pay himself $1, as CEOs of some companies have done in the past. (Warren Buffett’s base pay last year was $100,000.) It would be an acknowledgment that Ford is driving in reverse.

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.