Last year money maven Mario Gabelli decided to forgo his base salary at Gabelli Asset Management, whose earnings fell 13 percent, to $53 million, as assets under management dropped 15 percent, to $21.2 billion. But don’t weep for the well-known stock picker: According to the firm’s annual proxy statement, filed last month, Gabelli still took home $38 million -- an eye-popping 72 percent of his publicly held company’s net income -- thanks to a cash incentive package that is based on company profits, investment performance and new-business generation, among other things. Gabelli’s haul, easily one of the richest compensation packages in financial services, nonetheless represents quite a comedown from 2001, when he took home $47 million, or about 77 percent of the company’s net. Does Super Mario think his pay might be too high for a bear market? Nah. “This was the structure we had in place when we did the deal,” he says, referring to his firm’s 1999 IPO. “The deal is the deal.”
