Lordstown CEO Ninivaggi Made $5 Million Last Year

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published May 11, 9:30AM EDT

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Lordstown CEO Ninivaggi Made $5 Million Last Year — © vladans / iStock

Lordstown may not survive to see the end of 2022. Its finances are in tatters, and its ability to produce vehicles has been severely compromised. Its trouble started last year. Inexplicably, Chief Executive Officer Daniel Ninivaggi (who took the job in August) made $5,564,048, according to the company’s proxy.
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Lordstown likely will be a penny stock soon. It trades at $1.57. That is down from a 52-week high to $15.80 and an all-time high of over $30.

The number of vehicles Lordstown plans to produce this year is frighteningly small. The company says it could be 550 of its Endurance model. The company had $204 cash on its balance sheet at the end of the last quarter. Revenue for the quarter was zero. The loss for the period was $89 million.
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As the company looked forward, it warned of “the need to raise substantial additional capital” and the risk it can “continue ongoing operations and remain a going concern.”
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What made Ninivaggi worth $5,564,048? The board could say it was because he took a risky job. That is cold comfort for the company’s investors and the employees whose jobs are on the line.
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The question of high CEO pay has been a concern of investors for years. The average pay of an S&P 500 company was about $13 million last year. And all these are large companies that dwarf Lordstown in size.

What is certain about Lordstown is that Ninivaggi will leave a rich man. The people who work there and the investors may receive nothing.

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.