How Much Is a Ferrari CEO Worth?

Since his company remains one of the nicest, most respected brands in the luxury car world, it would make sense that Ferrari’s Chief Executive Officer earns a lot of money. He oversees everything—and given the company’s unshakable reputation, current Chairman Luca Cordero di Montezemolo seems to be doing an incredible job. In business, good work often results in a good reward, but getting paid twice as much as your boss seems excessive, even for a job well done. That’s what happened though with Montezemolo. 2010 reports showed the CEO of Ferrari made more than twice as much as his “boss” at Fiat, begging the question: how much is a Ferrari CEO worth?

As it turns out, he’s worth 8.7 million euros a year (or 11.87 million in American dollars). That’s a lot of course, but after the horror stories of Wall Street CEOs ranking in hundreds of millions as their employees lost healthcare, it’s certainly not an absurd amount. Ferrari doesn’t make cheap cars, so anyone would expect its Chief Executive Officer would rake in a sizeable paycheck every year. The surprise, though, came from finding out how much less the CEO of Fiat, Ferrari’s parent company, makes a year: 3.5 million euros.

Few other places in the business world reveal a boss making less than half as much as someone beneath him, but that’s the case with Ferrari and Fiat. Fiat CEO Sergio Marchionne technically oversees Ferrari and a huge domain of other car brands, but his paycheck doesn’t express that added responsibility. Montezemolo makes a lot more, so when people ask, “How much is a Ferrari CEO worth?” they don’t need an exact figure: twice as much as his boss is a sufficient answer.