Japan Air's profits haven't been amazing, and in fact, they filed for Chapter 11 in January 2010. I presume (with no actual knowledge) that if the airline were doing very well, he would pay himself significantly more. However, in a world where banks in America have to be bailed out while their CEOs give themselves raises, this is, I think, the preferred way to go.
Airline unions usually negotiate the payout contract to between 95% to 98% of the expected airline's profits (what is the airline going to do? shut down?).
When the airline does not make the expected revenue, by numbers, they end up having to borrow money and pay out a sum that ends up being over 100%.
with all those nasty unions stealing all your money it's amazing that the executives want to carry on running the airline - it must be the pure love of flying that keeps the CEOs in the job
Hollywood doesn't claim that the blockbusters make a loss. They can't get that creative with their accounting to make millions/billions of dollars vanish from the IRS. What they do is shuffle the profits around between their sub-companies. Say you sign a contract with Universal Pictures to get 20% of the profits of the movie. Now Universal Pictures takes a loss on the movie by moving all of the profits to Universal DVD Distribution or some other company under the "Universal" umbrella. So that other corp has record profits, while the one you hold the contract with reports a loss. [ The money can be 'moved' between companies by just charging exorbitant prices for their services rendered. E.g. Universal DVD Distribution charges huge amounts of money to Universal Pictures for the DVD production. ]
My point was that the money goes somewhere. They move things around through sibling corporations, so that if you have a contract for a percentage of profits with one of them, then they move the profits to another sibling corp that you don't have a contract with. It doesn't have to specifically be the DVD production/sales that they are moved around through.
