Chuck Prince—who helms the good ship Citigroup as it continues to narrowly avoid wreckage on hazards called Demand for Break-Up, Stock Underperforming, Expenses Outrage, Unsatisfied Arabs and Maria Bartiromo—took in nearly $26 million dollars this year.

That's modest compared to some of his Wall Street peers but then Citigroup's stock performance has been pretty modest too.

What's most interesting is the rumor we heard today from a completely unreliable source. We mean that. Completely unreliable. But still entertaining and that's why we still read his emails.

At that lunch at Four Seasons a couple of weeks ago, Sandy Weill told Chuck Prince that the true measure of success in the finance world is having a working fireplace in your office, according to our source (who, we repeat, has no discernable way of learning such things). This struck us as far fetched until we asked around.

And at least this much is true: way back when he kept an office on the 106th floor of the World Trade Center, Sandy Weill had a working fireplace in his office. We're not sure what this symbolizes about the guy who built Citigroup—and we're pretty sure that the Prince and Weill conversation did not involve the fireplace at all—but surely it symbolizes something. A working fireplace in the World Trade Center? Talk about symbolic, meaningless, wasteful acquisitions.

For Citigroup’s C.E.O., It Was a Very Good Year [New York Times]