Charter Communications chairman and CEO Tom Rutledge received compensation worth $41.8 million in 2021, just up from $38.8 million in 2020 and $8.74 million in 2019.
An SEC filing issued Thursday by Charter, in which John Malone’s Liberty Broadband owns a big stake, indicated Rutledge’s base salary for 2021 was $2.5 million, a bump up from a year-earlier $2.07 million. The bulk of his overall pay for Rutledge was another year in receiving $30 million in option awards in 2021, after receiving the same amount in 2020.
Rutledge also received $8.9 million in non-equity incentive plan compensation in 2021, up from $6.3 million received a year earlier as part of executive bonus payments.
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Charter Vice Chairman John Bickham earned $7.4 million in 2021, down from $36.45 million in 2020 when he was COO. Bickham was named vice chairman in late 2021, ahead of his retirement at the end of 2022.
Senior executive vp David Ellen saw his compensation fall to $9.35 million in 2021, from an overall pay package of $10.78 million in 2020. And Christopher Winfrey, CFO before being named COO, saw his compensation remain virtually unchanged at $11.68 million for 2021, from $11.73 million in 2020.
Elsewhere, newly installed CFO Jessica Fischer earned a total pay package of $3.6 million in 2021. Cord-cutting due to cheaper streaming video services from the likes of Netflix and Amazon continues to impact video subscriber counts for many pay TV companies, while cable giants like Charter add to their Internet customer counts.
Cable operator Charter Communications, in which John Malone’s Liberty Broadband owns a big stake, lost more pay TV subscribers in the fourth quarter than in the year-ago period, while its broadband user growth slowed.
Charter lost 58,000 pay TV subscribers in the final quarter of 2021, compared with a loss of 35,000 in the year-ago period. As of the end of 2021, it had more than 15.83 million total video subscribers.
