Hightower Lowdown

Millions of Americans will be fired by corporations this year, but few will feel as good about it as Jill Barad.

Not that she wanted to get her pink slip, but surely she saw it coming. She was the top employee of Mattel Inc., the giant toy maker that lost millions of dollars during her tenure as CEO. Now, if you or I had cost our company millions of dollars, we'd get a swift kick in the ass right out the door. But unlike the thousands of Mattel employees that Barad had booted while she was in charge there, her pink slip came with a sweetheart separation agreement.

How sweet? Start with the lump-sum payment of more than $26 million she received. This includes five times her annual salary plus bonuses and the forgiving $7 million in loans she got from the company over the years.

And it just keeps getting sweeter. The 46-year old ex-CEO will be paid a pension of $708,989 a year for the rest of her life. The company will also pay for her $5 million life insurance policy; her health insurance; outplacement services to help ease her transition into a post-Mattel life; financial consultants to handle all the money she's being handed; and what is mysteriously described as "certain club memberships."

We're not through. She also gets to keep her security guards, some of her office equipment her company car—and she gets 6.4 million shares of Mattel stock, potentially worth tens of millions of dollars.