hile Middle Americans have to contend with free trade layoffs as a volatile stock market atters their retirement accounts, the chief executive officers of the country's cash-rich corporations are making a killing from skyrocketing pay and compensation.

Analysts who study CEO compensation typically use words like "gargantuan," and "astronomical" to describe some of the increasingly gigantic financial rewards being handed out. Even the corporate-friendly Fortune magazine admits that the "dollar amounts [are] so mammoth that even hardened professionals grope for words."

In recent years, CEO compensation has soared to heights never seen before, into nine-figure totals that seem to bear no intelligible relation to services performed.

The top CEO income earners in each of the last five years got compensation packages valued cumulatively at nearly $1.4 billion - an average of $274 million for each of the five. Yet despite being managed by the highest-priced CEOs, four of the companies performed only marginally or poorly in terms of profits and dividends. The four are Disney, Cendant, Computer Associates, and Apple Computer.

Apple's Steve Jobs got the biggest pay package of all CEO's last year, valued by Fortune magazine at $381 million. The package included his own personal - not corporate owned - Gulfstream jet valued at $90 million. He reportedly received a stock options grant worth $872,000,000.

Pro-immigration activist Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle Corp., received a stock option grant of 20 million shares, even though he already owned almost 700 million shares.

Global Crossing CEO Robert Annunziata got a Mercedes Benz SL500, as well as first class airfare for his mother and family to come visit him once a week until he moved near the company headquarters.

Some CEO's got fat deals just for leaving their companies.

John Rigas, CEO at Adelphia, got a severance package worth $1.4 million a year over three years, even though the company filed for bankruptcy in June. It's stock went from $40.88 a share in July 2001 to just 14 cents.

CEO Gerald Levin left AOL Time Warner with a $26 million deal, even though he oversaw the value of AOL's merger with Time Warner fall from $100 billion to less than $60 billion.
Dennis Kozlowski of Tyco reportedly made $196.5 million in stock since 1998 while the value of his company's stock lost $80 billion. The company also gave him an $18 million New York "crash pad."

CEO Joseph Nacchio of Qwest got $248 million from the sale of company stock. Qwest is now $26 billion in debt and its stock lost 86 percent of its value this year.

The compensation, says Charles Elson, who runs the Univsersity of Delaware's Center for Corporate Governance, is "outrageous in many cases and unrelated to services rendered."