Business

US social-gaming company Zynga hasn’t just given its new chief executive a pay package worth as much as $100 million over five years. It has also structured the package in a way that could encourage him to try to sell the company sooner rather than later.

We recently told you about four companies ignoring their shareholders’ votes. One was Hecla Mining, a silver producer that held the polls open longer than planned when it looked like shareholders were going to reject management’s pay package.

The vote is only advisory, but Hecla’s stalling worked: Instead of failing 49.6% to 46.7%, the company’s say-on-pay vote passed with 53.7% of the vote.

When Wal-Mart Stores does a thing, it does it big. The stock buy-back it announced at its annual meeting today is no exception, at $15 billion, hot on the heels of an earlier $15-billion repurchase plan.

So it’s probably a good time to remember that stock buybacks generally aren’t the unparalleled good that they can seem at first glance.

Think of yesterday afternoon as a triple witching hour of US corporate disclosure: The final minutes of the final day for many big companies to file their latest quarterly reports—and a Friday afternoon, on top of that.

McDonald’s and Costco would seem to have a lot in common, what with their relentless pursuit of cost-conscious consumers in the name of value.

But this month, the fast-food giant snubbed the US warehouse shopping club, dropping it from among two dozen or so competitors, consumer-product companies and retailers that McDonald’s uses to assess executive pay.

Who says Wall Street isn’t a family-friendly place?

For Monsanto, the “Monsanto Protection Act” seems to be no big deal, at least to judge by what the big agrichemical company is telling its shareholders.

Air Products & Chemicals got some press recently when it was held up as an example of corporate America’s renewed dedication to paying CEOs only if they perform.