Apple Inc.’s Tim Cook has the best pay-for-performance rating of any chief executive officer on the Bloomberg Pay Index, the first daily ranking of the highest-paid U.S. executives.

Cook was awarded $65.2 million in compensation last year. During the three fiscal years he has run Apple, revenue climbed 69 percent to $183 billion and net income grew 53 percent to $39.5 billion. Sales of iPhones more than doubled to $102 billion.

“Apple is just unbelievably killing it,” said Dan Ernst, an analyst at Hudson Square Research in New York. “A good leader like Cook builds a team around him that can do the job.”

The 54-year-old’s awarded pay package, which makes him the 17th-highest paid U.S. executive, is dwarfed by Apple’s three- year average economic profit of $28.6 billion, the index shows.

The pay-for-performance measure used in the Bloomberg ranking is calculated using an executive’s pay as a percentage of a company’s economic profit, which is defined as after-tax net operating profit minus its cost of capital. Cook’s pay is 0.2 percent of economic profit, the smallest fraction of any CEO in the ranking, showing that investors are getting a better return on each dollar they pay Cook.

Apple gave Cook $9.2 million last year, including a salary of $1.8 million, a $6.7 million bonus and $699,133 for security, according to the summary compensation table in its proxy filed in January. That figure doesn’t include 80,000 restricted stock units granted to him in August 2011 that were meant to compensate him for 2014. Following a seven-for-one stock split in June, Cook’s 560,000 restricted shares were valued at $56 million at the end of the company’s fiscal year in September.

Executive Pay

Josh Rosenstock, a spokesman for Apple, wouldn’t comment for this story.

The Bloomberg Pay Index tracks the 100 highest-paid executives, regardless of title, that appear in regulatory filings for companies that trade on U.S. exchanges. Each executive’s pay package is updated every business day as fluctuations in stock prices change the value of their equity awards.

The ranking was published April 16 with the release of pay profile pages for more than 350 executives on the Bloomberg Professional service. Each profile features an analysis of how much an executive can potentially earn and how his or her pay- for-performance is calculated.

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