CEO funnier than Ford's "profits"

In case you didn't catch this story, this is Ford CEO Alan Mulally's idea of a joke. He told a room full of reporters that President Bush nearly blew himself up for plugging an electrical cord into a hydrogen tank on an electric/hydrogen hybrid car prototype that was brought to the White House for a photo-op.

Too bad it wasn't true.

The best part was his rationalization - he saw the joke on Jimmy Kimmel Live.

One would think the CEO of Ford, which lost $12.7 billion last year, would have better things to do than trying to be something he's not - funny.

One thing he is, though, is rich; he reportedly received over $20 million in compensation from Ford in 2006 for working four months.

Ford is in serious trouble, which is no laughing matter.

According to the Associate Press,

In December 2006, Ford announced that it would mortgage all assets, including factories and equipment, office property, intellectual property (patents and trademarks), and its stakes in subsidiaries, all to raise $23.4 billion in cash. The secured credit line is expected to finance product development during the restructuring through 2009, as the company expects to burn through $17 billion in cash before turning a profit. These drastic actions are unprecedented in the Ford's 103-year history.

Call me crazy, but that's a lot of scratch. One would think that a chief executive genuinely interested in saving his company would take some sort of pay cut, or at least defer part of his exorbitant compensation. I wonder how Mulally can look blue collar workers in the eye after receiving that much largess in light of the worst fiscal year in corporate history.

I wonder if Bush whispered anything in Mulally's ear about his compensation.

I'll spare you the suspense, or the digging. I'd bet what I'm worth that Bush probably high-fived him.

Who among us could do anything but laugh when Bush, during one of his trademark b.s. photo-ops, looked into the camera with a straight face and said, "companies need to carefully consider what they pay executives."

I guess, by that, he means every company except Halliburton, which gave Dick a $20 million severance package in 2000; or Harken Energy, whose board President Bush served on in the late 1980s. One week before the company announced an enormous loss of nearly $25 million, Bush sold over 200,000 shares of the company at $4 a share, netting him nearly $1 million.