Major Executives Getting Rich Off Dividends

There are two notable executives that make more than a billion each year.

Collectively, the Walton family puts the remaining executives to shame, as they own approximately 1.6 billion shares of Wal-Mart (WMT ). Still, seeing Warren Buffett compete with an entire family of investors gives you an idea for just how successful of an investor he is as he is well above any other single executive on the list.

The following high-powered executives have yet to crack the billion dollar scale, but they are still accumulating a substantial amount of money from their dividend payouts.

Investors should note that Larry Ellison owns over 1.1 billion shares of Oracle (ORCL ); should that company ever increase its dividend, his annual income would spike. Also of significant interest, when Steve Ballmer announced he would retire as the Microsoft (MSFT ) chief executive, the stock spiked accordingly. Owning more than 330 million shares, Ballmer watched his net worth increase by approximately $840 million simply by announcing that he would be stepping down at the end of 2013.

Making a million a year in dividends is certainly nothing to complain about. Here are some of the biggest names that fall under that category.

Though Lockheed Martin’s (LMT ) Robert Stevens owns just over 200,000 shares in his company, the annual payout of $6.00 a share is able to propel him into the elusive million dollar club.

Below we take a look at some of the most well-known executives for firms that do not offer a dividend. The following charts display what some of the most famous executives could make annually if they offered a dividend. The first bar displays what they could make with the average S&P 500 yield of 1.88% and the second shows income if the firms paid out a healthy 4%. The first chart shows two that fall well above the rest with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.

Zuckerberg owns nearly 479 million shares of Facebook and Bezos holds nearly 84 million shares in his respective firm. Though not quite on the level of the former two executives, Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer, Chipotle’s Steve Ells and Google’s Larry Page could pull in a handsome sum if their firms initiated a payout.

Here is the full list of executives and their respective companies mentioned above. Click on the ticker for each firm to learn more about their dividend yield and other vital stats:

While it is certainly interesting to see the upper bounds of dividend investing, the numbers and figures mentioned above demonstrate the power of buy and hold investing. Not every investor will be able to reach the highs that some of these executives display, but their annual income in dividends alone showcases how important compounding and long-term dividend investing truly is. Reinvesting dividends and adding to your positions over time will continue to yield larger dividend income each year, which can go a long way when it comes time to retire.

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