An options windfall for Apple’s top Mac and iPhone hardware engineer
Several senior Apple (AAPL) executives — including Betsy Rafael (controller), Jeffrey Williams (operations senior VP) and Bertrand Serlet (software engineering senior VP) — took advantage of the company’s recent record share prices to exercise some of the stock options they’ve been sitting on.
But none saw quite the windfall that Bob Mansfield enjoyed last Thursday. According to an SEC Form 4 filed Tuesday, Mansfield sold 40,000 shares on 10/21 with a strike price of $36.54 for $308 apiece — clearing a cool $10.844 million in the deal.
Mansfield, who came to the company in 1999 when Apple acquired a Silicon Graphics spinoff called Raycer, has become a familiar face in Apple’s promotional videos, including the MacBook Air promo that Steve Jobs played last Wednesday. As senior vice president of hardware engineering, he oversaw the development of such products as the iMac and the MacBook.
It was Mansfield who brought his University of Texas classmate Mark Papermaster to Apple from IBM (IBM), a hire that triggered a federal injunction. When Papermaster left Apple in August, reportedly following a falling out with Steve Jobs, Mansfield took over his duties. He now heads the hardware teams for the iPhone as well as the Mac, with an annual salary of $600,396 according to Forbes.
Mansfield’s market timing was pretty good, but not as good as Serlet’s, who sold 5,000 shares on Oct. 18 for $318.50 each, within $0.50 of Apple’s all-time intraday high.
[Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter @philiped]
