Steve Jobs: Top paid CEO

Steve Jobs of Apple was the top-paid US chief executive last year in 2006, receiving some 646 million dollars, Forbes magazine said.

Even though Jobs was paid a nominal one-dollar salary, the value of his stock options and other benefits made him the highest compensated CEO, the magazine said.

Forbes, in releasing its survey late Thursday, said the CEOs of America's 500 biggest companies got a collective 38 percent pay raise last year, to 7.5 billion dollars, or an average 15.2 million dollars.

Exercised stock options accounted for the main component of pay, or about 48 percent, Forbes said.

Number two on the list was Occidental Petroleum's Ray Irani with 321.6 million dollars, followed by Barry Diller at InterActive Corp (295 million), Fidelity National's William Foley (179 million) and Terry Semel of Yahoo (174 million).

Michael Dell, who retook the reins at Dell Computer, was sixth with a compensation package worth 153 million dollars.

With an outcry growing over extravagant pay packages for US corporate executives, Forbes said the highest-paid CEOs were not always those that delivered the most to shareholders.

Forbes said by its analysis, Apple's Jobs was 36th. Topping the list was John Bucksbaum of General Growth Properties, a real-estate investment trust. Over the past six years, Bucksbaum was paid 723,000 dollars a year while delivering a 39 percent annual return to shareholders.

At the bottom of the performance/pay rankings was Richard Manoogian, CEO of housing products maker Masco, with a six-year annual return of five percent and a paycheck averaging 11 million dollars a year