Bits Blog: Apple’s Peter Oppenheimer Is Highest Paid Finance Chief

Apple Peter Oppenheimer, Apple’s chief financial officer.

Being a tax ninja pays off at Apple. Its chief financial officer, Peter Oppenheimer, who has helped the company sidestep billions of dollars in taxes, was the highest paid chief financial officer of 2012, according to data compiled by Bloomberg News.

Mr. Oppenheimer was awarded a $68.6 million package, much higher than the $4.17 million that went to Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, says Bloomberg. Oracle’s financial chief, Safra Catz, was the second highest paid with $51.7 million; Google’s Patrick Pichette was third with $38.7 million.

Of course, all corporations do their best to minimize taxes. Apple’s Mr. Oppenheimer has done an exceptional job managing the company’s cash, finding legal ways to side step billions of dollars in taxes, allocating about 70 percent of its profits overseas, where tax rates are often much lower.

Last month, Apple’s Mr. Oppenheimer raised a bond deal of $17 billion to fund a $100 billion payout to shareholders. By borrowing money, or issuing debt, Apple avoided $9.2 billion in United States taxes.

Profiles in Science Peter G. Neumann: Rethinking the Computer at 80

One of those is Peter G. Neumann, now an 80-year-old computer scientist at SRI International, a pioneering engineering research laboratory here.

As an applied-mathematics student at Harvard, Dr. Neumann had a two-hour breakfast with Einstein on Nov. 8, 1952. What the young math student took away was a deeply held philosophy of design that has remained with him for six decades and has been his governing principle of computing and computer security.

For many of those years, Dr. Neumann (pronounced NOY-man) has remained a voice in the wilderness, tirelessly pointing out that the computer industry has a penchant for repeating the mistakes of the past. He has long been one of the nation’s leading specialists in computer security, and early on he predicted that the security flaws that have accompanied the pell-mell explosion of the computer and Internet industries would have disastrous consequences.

“His biggest contribution is to stress the ‘systems’ nature of the security and reliability problems,” said Steven M. Bellovin, chief technology officer of the Federal Trade Commission. “That is, trouble occurs not because of one failure, but because of the way many different pieces interact.”

Dr. Bellovin said that it was Dr. Neumann who originally gave him the insight that “complex systems break in complex ways” — that the increasing complexity of modern hardware and software has made it virtually impossible to identify the flaws and vulnerabilities in computer systems and ensure that they are secure and trustworthy.

The consequence has come to pass in the form of an epidemic of computer malware and rising concerns about cyberwarfare as a threat to global security, voiced alarmingly this month by the defense secretary, Leon E. Panetta, who warned of a possible “cyber-Pearl Harbor” attack on the United States.

It is remarkable, then, that years after most of his contemporaries have retired, Dr. Neumann is still at it and has seized the opportunity to start over and redesign computers and software from a “clean slate.”

He is leading a team of researchers in an effort to completely rethink how to make computers and networks secure, in a five-year project financed by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, with Robert N. Watson, a computer security researcher at Cambridge University’s Computer Laboratory.

“I’ve been tilting at the same windmills for basically 40 years,” said Dr. Neumann recently during a lunchtime interview at a Chinese restaurant near his art-filled home in Palo Alto, Calif. “And I get the impression that most of the folks who are responsible don’t want to hear about complexity. They are interested in quick and dirty solutions.”

An Early Voice for Security

Dr. Neumann, who left Bell Labs and moved to California as a single father with three young children in 1970, has occupied the same office at SRI for four decades. Until the building was recently modified to make it earthquake-resistant, the office had attained notoriety for the towering stacks of computer science literature that filled every cranny. Legend has it that colleagues who visited the office after the 1989 earthquake were stunned to discover that while other offices were in disarray from the 7.1-magnitude quake, nothing in Dr. Neumann’s office appeared to have been disturbed.

A trim and agile man, with piercing eyes and a salt-and-pepper beard, Dr. Neumann has practiced tai chi for decades. But his passion, besides computer security, is music. He plays a variety of instruments, including bassoon, French horn, trombone and piano, and is active in a variety of musical groups. At computer security conferences it has become a tradition for Dr. Neumann to lead his colleagues in song, playing tunes from Gilbert and Sullivan and Tom Lehrer.

Until recently, security was a backwater in the world of computing. Today it is a multibillion-dollar industry, though one of dubious competence, and safeguarding the nation’s computerized critical infrastructure has taken on added urgency. President Obama cited it in the third debate of the presidential campaign, focusing on foreign policy, as something “we need to be thinking about” as part of the nation’s military strategy.

Peter Praeger, a Surgeon With a Health Food Company, Dies at 65

The cause has not been determined, his wife, Nurit, said. Dr. Praeger, who lived in Briarcliff Manor, N.Y., had been undergoing treatment for prostate cancer.

At his death, Dr. Praeger was a co-chief of cardiothoracic surgery at Hackensack University Medical Center. He was also president and chief executive of Dr. Praeger’s Sensible Foods, a maker of frozen natural foods, including veggie burgers and meatless chicken, sold in supermarkets and health-food stores in the United States and abroad.

Though the story of Dr. Praeger’s company — born of two rabbinical prognostications, any number of hairpin turns of fate and the transformative realization that man cannot live by gefilte fish alone — reads like something out of Sholem Aleichem, it began, no less, on a Christmas Eve.

The time was the late 1980s, and Dr. Praeger was then on the staff of Westchester County Medical Center in Valhalla, N.Y. That December night, he was called in with his colleague, Dr. Eric Somberg, to perform emergency surgery. The patient, who had been hit by a drunken driver, had a ruptured aorta, and his life was at risk.

Through the surgeons’ efforts the man’s life was saved, although he was left unable to move his arms and legs. The patient’s brother-in-law, Rubin Ungar, told Dr. Praeger that the family rabbi predicted he would regain the use of his limbs. As a man of science, Dr. Praeger discounted the idea, as did the neurologist he consulted.

The patient regained the use of his limbs.

Several years went by. Then one day in the early 1990s, Dr. Praeger received a call from Mr. Ungar, whom he had befriended in the course of treating his brother-in-law.

The patient was fine, but Mr. Ungar’s gefilte fish company was in trouble. The family rabbi had made another prediction: Any surgeon smart enough to save his congregant’s life would be smart enough to save his congregant’s brother-in-law’s gefilte fish company.

Dr. Praeger demurred: he was, after all, a surgeon, not a fish maven. Mr. Ungar persisted.

What was more, Dr. Praeger did not like gefilte fish, the pale, perennial Ashkenazi appetizer made from poached ground fish.

But who, in the end, can fly in the face of rabbinical foreordination?

“It was like ‘The Godfather,’ ” Dr. Praeger told the magazine New Jersey Monthly in 2007. “They pulled me into it.”

Peter Ivan Praeger was born in Budapest on Sept. 20, 1947. After the Hungarian uprising of 1956, his family left for the United States, settling first in Newark and then in Queens. His father worked as a baker and later opened a men’s clothing store in Harlem.

Peter Praeger earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Bridgeport and an M.D. from New York Medical College. At Hackensack, his responsibilities included implanting left ventricular assist devices, used to aid patients whose hearts are failing.

In the early ’90s, Drs. Praeger and Somberg became partners in Ungar’s Gefilte Fish. They soon realized that the company’s raison d’être was also its undoing.

“Unfortunately,” Dr. Praeger told the industry magazine Food and Drink in 2010, “the only product he was making at that time was gefilte fish.”

In 1994, the two doctors bought the company and gradually developed a line of meatless frozen foods. All are kosher, made from natural ingredients and low in cholesterol and saturated fat.

Dr. Praeger’s first marriage, to Ellen Epstein, ended in divorce. Besides his wife, the former Nurit Gavrielli, he is survived by their daughter, Lexy, and son, Tommy; three children from his first marriage, Larry, Danielle and Jonathan Praeger; a sister, Eva Freed; and two grandchildren.

Today, Dr. Praeger’s Sensible Foods, based in Elmwood Park, N.J., is a multimillion-dollar concern, selling its wares throughout the United States — retail outlets include Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods and Zabar’s — as well as in Canada, South America and Israel. Its product line includes falafel, Tex-Mex veggie burgers and sweet potato pancakes.

It also includes gefilte fish, which Dr. Praeger came to love.