Tim Cook Passes on $75 million dividend

slashgear.com

9 points·dmvaldman··5 comments

That's... odd. Can anyone guess why he did this? Maybe tax reasons? He got a million shares for becoming CEO, so it's not like he's just into saving Apple money or anything.

This is a guess:

Perhaps its because he's the new CEO, and Apple has just issued a large dividend for the first time in a long time - it looks better if the new CEO isn't a major beneficiary of the policy shift. This shows everyone that he's in for the long run - there's no possible accusation that the dividend was for short term personal gain.

This also sends the signal that he isn't just paying the dividend because he thinks share growth (otherwise his main compensation) is finished with.

Apple really has some classy people representing their company. Well done.

This seemed extremely bizarre to me until I read the filing itself[1].

The RSUs in question are unvested. Apparently a change was just made by the board that means unvested RSUs will collect dividends which will be paid out upon vesting. Cook is declining those.

I can kind of understand that it would look strange to make a change like this to already-granted RSUs, but if it were that big of a concern, it seems odd that only Cook would decline the dividends, or that the board would have made the change retroactive in the first place, so I still don't entirely understand declining them.

[1] http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/320193/00011814311203...

Dividends on unvested stock options kind of suck. You don't get the money, but the value of your stock goes down (in theory by the amount of the dividend).

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