Ford’s CEO Overpaid by $21 Million

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Apr 3, 9:30AM EDT

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Ford’s CEO Overpaid by $21 Million — © Spencer Platt / Getty Images News via Getty Images

Ford Motor Co. (NYSE: F | F Price Prediction) CEO Jim Farley made $20,996,146 in 2022, one of the worst years in recent Ford history. Executive Chair Bill Ford, who really runs Ford, made $17,302,266. Ford should be considered the primary architect of Ford’s poor performance. Ford’s board has robbed shareholders again based on the compensation numbers. (These are the biggest electric vehicle business failures in American history.)

Ford’s share price began 2022 at about $20. It currently trades for a little more than $12. Farley managed almost to halve the price of the stock.

The year was full of fumbles. Ford underestimated the cost of parts by $1 billion in the third quarter. How can a major global manufacturer make such a huge mistake?

Ford’s F-150 Lightning was mispriced. The company had to raise prices four times, from a base price of $40,000 to $60,000. To be fair, some of those increases were this year.
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Ford’s quality problems, which Farley has acknowledged, continue. For example, the Lincoln and Ford brands did poorly in the important J.D. Power 2023 U.S. Customer Service Index (CSI) Study.
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Ford missed its 2022 full-year financial guidance. As The Wall Street Journal pointed out:

Ford Motor Co. posted disappointing quarterly results Thursday, leading the U.S. auto maker to miss its full-year profit guidance for 2022, as supply-chain snags, quality problems and structural inefficiencies continued to drag on earnings. Chief Executive Jim Farley said on a call with analysts, “We left about $2 billion of profit on the table due to cost, and especially, to continued supply-chain issues.”

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The list of failures at Ford last year is longer than those mentioned here. Ford laid off several thousand employees in 2022. Farley was not one of them. Instead, he became richer. So did Bill Ford, who is among the richest people in the country.

Ford’s board should have ousted Farley instead of paying him a fortune.

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.