Is any CEO worth $1 million a day? That’s roughly $42,000 an hour. Or $700 a minute. Or $12 a second. Think of it this way: in the time it took to read those words, you could’ve pocketed $100. Finish this article and — well, you do the math.

At Apple, the answer to that question is an emphatic yes, and then some. Not since Steve Jobs has a chief executive at Apple, or any other public American corporation, for that matter, been as richly rewarded in stock as Timothy D. Cook, who succeeded Jobs as chief executive last August, a few months before Jobs died.

Cook was paid a cash salary of roughly $900,000 in 2011. On its own, that would have been a ho-hum paycheck for a top American CEO in recent years. But then came a wild extra, a one-time award, in the form of Apple stock. It was initially worth a staggering $376.2 million. Recently, it was valued at roughly $634 million, reflecting Apple’s soaring share price.

Many credit Cook, along with Jobs, for Apple’s recent success. And the company is quick to note that Cook’s pay package extends over 10 years. One half of his stock is scheduled to vest in 2016, and the other in 2021, provided that Cook still works for Apple. And, at a time when some investors seethe over far smaller paychecks — a mere eight figures is relatively commonplace for top chief executives these days — Apple’s shareholders are hardly up in arms over the magnitude of Cook’s reward. To the contrary, a vast majority voted in favour of it.

Of course, most of us can’t begin to wrap our heads around pay figures like these. An American with a bachelors, after all, typically makes $2.3 million, not in a year, but over a lifetime, according to a recent study from Georgetown University.

Data on CEO compensation in 2011, albeit preliminary, confirm what many of us already know: The top brass generally do much better than the rest of us, whether times are good or bad. After the ups and downs of the recent boom-bust years, pay among the 100 best-paid chief executives at big American corporations held fairly steady in 2011, according to Equilar, which reviewed CEO compensation for The New York Times. Here are some numbers worth knowing:

• Among the 100 top-paid CEOs, overall pay last year rose a scant 2 per cent from 2010.

• The median chief executive in this group took home $14.4 million — compared to the average annual American salary of $45,230.

• The combined compensation of these 100 CEOs totaled $2.1 billion, the rough equivalent of the estimated annual economic output of Sierra Leone.

The full picture won’t become clear until June or so, when corporate proxy statements will detail the full range of executive compensation. But data available as of March 30 suggests that a new elite is emerging in corporate America: CEOs who make $10 million-plus a year.

Granted, these are chief executives of publicly traded companies, the kind of businesses anyone can buy into on the stock market. Next to pay in the rarefied realms of private American capitalism — the multitrillion-dollar world of hedge funds, private equity and the like — these CEOs might seem like pikers. Top hedge fund managers collectively earned $14.4 billion last year.

But the Equilar figures also hint at the myriad ways executive compensation is as tailored as a bespoke suit. It is those custom details — the one-off stock grants, in Cook’s case, the token $1 annual salaries or evaporating bonuses in others — that can turn dull proxy statements into page-turners.

Cook is an extreme example of this phenomenon. He is, experts agree, an outlier — the only chief executive on the Equilar list to pull down a nine-figure paycheck. His stock award was so valuable, even at its initial price, that his total compensation eclipsed that of the next nine CEOs combined. Those nine included Lawrence J. Ellison of Oracle, at $77.6 million, a perennial on the best-paid list, and Philippe P. Dauman of Viacom, at $43.1 million.

Aaron Boyd, the director of research at Equilar, the executive compensation data firm based in Redwood City, California, that has reviewed executive compensation trends annually for Sunday Business, said Cook’s pay was unique. “The amount he got was historic to such a degree that it skews the numbers,” Boyd said.

But Apple was not the only special case. Consider J.C. Penney, whose new chief executive, Ronald B. Johnson, came in third on the list, with total compensation of $53.3 million. Why? Last year, Johnson left his position as senior vice- president of retail at Apple, along with Apple stock worth $101 million at the time that had not yet vested. So, as part of his pay package, J.C. Penney gave Johnson a one-time stock award worth $52.6 million. (As of the end of last week, his Apple stock would have been worth about $159 million. His Penney stock was worth $58 million.)

Analysts say the uptick in CEO pay is a sign that corporations are returning to business as usual after the last recession. When the economy soured, executive pay fell sharply at many companies, though not as much as ordinary Americans might have hoped. With the recovery in 2010, pay skyrocketed. Now it’s stabilising, suggesting, perhaps, that corporate boards see more predictable economic times ahead.

“On average, pay levels have moderated,” said Doug Friske, the global head of executive compensation consulting at Towers Watson, a human resource consulting firm in New York. “Now we are seeing normalisation.”

Corporate boards also seem to be acknowledging criticism of executive pay from shareholders and the public. Some companies have reduced discretionary bonuses and linked executive pay more closely to performance metrics like revenue and share price. Last year, companies also began to hold shareholder votes on executive pay packages, so-called “say on pay” polls required by Dodd-Frank, the Wall Street reform law.

The 100 highest earners of 2011 have one thing in common, however. Although they could all rank among the 1 per cent — households that bring in $380,000 or more — they actually belong in a more exclusive bracket: people with more than $10 million in pay.

But the CEO wealth is hardly trickling down. In 2010, the top 1 per cent captured 93 per cent of the income gains, while the incomes of the 99 per cent essentially remained flat, according to a study by Emmanuel Saez, an economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

In 2011, the median weekly earnings for full-time workers in the US rose about 1 per cent, to $756, from $747 in 2010, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In constant dollars, wages fell a little more than 2 per cent.

The C-suite and the shop floor have never been further apart, said Brandon Rees, the deputy director of the AFL-CIO office of investment. “American workers are having to make do with less while CEOs have never had it better.”

Equilar analyzed base salaries, cash bonuses, perks, stock awards and options for the 100 most highly compensated executives at public companies that had revenue of more than $5 billion.

One standout on the list was Vikram S. Pandit, the chief executive of Citigroup. After the company was bailed out by taxpayers in 2009, Pandit pledged to work for $1 a year until the bank returned to profitability. Citigroup has since repaid its bailout money, and the board has restored Pandit’s pay. It amounted to $14.9 million last year, putting Pandit in 45th place on Equilar’s list. Citigroup’s longtime shareholders are still waiting for their payday: while the company’s net income rose 3 per cent last year, Equilar said; its share price fell 44 per cent.

New “say on pay” votes, though nonbinding, have caused some companies to make a greater proportion of pay contingent on chief executives’ achievements. Some companies have even eliminated stock option awards — the grants of stock that executives are able to buy at a fixed price — in favour of full-value stock awards that vest only if executives meet specified goals, said Carol Bowie, head of Americas research at Institutional Shareholder Services, a proxy consulting firm for institutional investors.

“We are definitely seeing a trend toward more performance-based pay,” Bowie said. “It remains to be seen if performance follows.”

The rest of the top earners list reads like an A-list of corporate titans, from Robert A. Iger of Walt Disney, ranked seventh to William C. Weldon of Johnson & Johnson, ranked 13th.

Rupert Murdoch of News Corp. took tenth place, with compensation of $29.4 million — a 75 per cent increase from 2010. In a year when News Corp. was embroiled in a scandal over phone hacking, Murdoch earned a cash bonus of $12.5 million because the company did well financially, analysts said, even if its reputation plummeted.

Also among the top 10, David M. Cote, the chief executive of Honeywell, received total compensation of $35.3 million, putting him in fifth place. Clarence P. Cazalot Jr, the chief executive of Marathon Oil, received $29.9 million, an increase of 239 per cent from the previous year. That put him in eighth place. Next, Alan R. Mulally, who helped turn around Ford, took ninth place, with compensation of $29.5 million. Although Ford’s share price fell nearly 36 per cent last year, its net income increased 208 per cent.