Thanks to a silly SEC requirement, TheStreet.com made Jim Cramer's salary a matter of public record. The stock picker of questionable talent saw his pay jump 30 percent, earning a base of $1.3 million this year (up from $1m) and, by 2010, some $1.87 million. Since we're crunching numbers, consider what would've happened should have followed Cramer's advice on CNBC about keeping your investment in crumble-prone Bear Sterns: If you owned 10,000 shares of the company when it was worth $60 a share, your $600,000 investment would've been worth just $100,000 after JPMorgan paid the $10 a share it bought the company for. That's a depreciation of 83 percent, or an overall value loss of 600 percent. And that's why some of us make the big bucks.