[Photo:  Stephen Schwarzman  -  Natalie White / Stanford Graduate School of Business]

Stephen Schwarzman, CEO and a co-founder of the Blackstone Group, receives an annual salary of $350,000, and gets no bonus. Yet, his total compensation for 2015 and 2014 around $800 million and $689 million, respectively.

As they say, “There is CEO pay. Then there is private equity CEO pay.”

When large corporations disclose how much money their top executives make each year, the companies list salary, bonus and, in many cases, stock options or grants. It can add up to tens of millions of dollars. Top executives at the publicly traded private equity firms get all that, and a whole lot more. They often pocket money from a variety of additional sources that can total hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

But you don’t need to be Mr. Schwarzman to earn huge sums at Blackstone, arguably the industry’s most successful firm. Hamilton James, Blackstone’s president, received $233 million in 2015, while Blackstone’s real estate chief, Jonathan Gray, earned $249 million.

Other prominent firms have produced big payouts as well. In 2013, the biggest winner was Leon Black, the head of Apollo Global Management, who received about $543 million. In 2015, Henry Kravis and George Roberts, the co-heads of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Company, collected a combined $356 million.

To put these huge numbers in perspective, The NYTimes also asked Equilar, a board and executive data provider, to pull data on the annual payouts to chief executives of the nation’s largest banks and technology companies.

Using the same method it used for private equity, Equilar collected data from the nation’s largest banks and the technology giants. As a final undertaking, Equilar scanned its broader database of companies to search for the largest executive payouts from 2015. The conclusion of the study was striking: Private equity has the best-paid executives of any major American industry. The Times based that conclusion on several findings. For one thing, of the top 15 executive payouts from 2015, 10 were in private equity. In private equity alone, there were eight executives who reaped more than $100 million. From every other

Here's a chart of the Top Private Equity Executives.