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1999 was a very good year for dotcom IPOs, Y2K firms, Yankee fans, French burgundies and end-of-the-millennium Top 100 lists of every kind. It was also a pretty good year for Disney CEO Michael Eisner, who brought home more than $50 million in pay, owing mostly to the raft of stock options he exercised that year.

That said, Eisner didn’t fare nearly as well as he had the year before. Running "the Mouse," as Disney is affectionately known among its employees, Eisner earned a staggering $575.6 million in 1998—according to BusinessWeek, one of the largest scores ever by a CEO of a publicly traded company. The fact is, the ’90s were a very, very good decade for CEOs of large public companies in general: Between 1990 and 1998, their average haul skyrocketed from $2 million to $10.6 million, an increase of 442 percent.

Until recently, the vast majority of people who push a mouse for a living, CIOs included, have stood on the sidelines shaking their heads at the great, good fortunes of America’s CEOs. "Eisner makes hundreds of millions, and his CIO is lucky if he makes $500,000," jokes Victor Janulaitis, CEO of Positive Support Review, a Santa Monica, Calif.-based IT consultancy that, among other things, surveys CIO salaries. And how lucky did Disney’s first ever CIO, Bud Mathaisel (who served a five-year stint that ended in 1990), actually feel?

"Let’s just say I made a comfortable living," says Mathaisel, who, like most CIOs—and most Americans—would sooner confess to fudging their golf scores than reveal how much they’re paid.

These days, however, if CIOs are keeping mum about their paychecks, at least it’s no longer out of a sense of inferiority. Thanks to the rapid emergence of the new economy and the concomitant rising expectations for IT, CIOs are increasingly being viewed and recruited as key corporate officers, expected to work closely with CEOs, COOs and CFOs to set and implement company strategy. Not surprisingly, as these CIOs pull up their chairs to the corporate power table, they’re demanding—and getting—bigger, fatter, healthier slices of the American pie.

Striking It Rich

Survey after survey shows CIO compensation not only growing dramatically during the past two years, especially in midsize and smaller companies, but often outpacing that of CFOs, the next species up the corporate food chain. (In fact, some headhunters report instances of CIOs overtaking CFOs in total compensation.)