Great story by Mark Maremont on posthumous executive pay in today's Wall Street Journal. We knew CEOs got paid for showing up at the office and merely matching the stock performance of their corporate rivals. We knew they got paid for gross incompetence. Now we know that not even a pulse is necessary to trigger gargantuan executive boodle. The way some of these guys run their companies, posthumous pay is still a great deal for shareholders.

You still can't take it with you. But some executives have arranged for the next best thing: huge corporate payouts to their heirs if they die in office.

Take Eugene Isenberg, the 78-year-old chief executive of Nabors Industries Ltd. If Mr. Isenberg died tomorrow, Nabors would owe his estate a "severance" payment of at least $263.6 million, company filings show. That's more than the first-quarter earnings at the Houston oil-service company.

Dozens of other companies offer lush death-benefit packages to their top executives, according to a Wall Street Journal review of federal filings. Many companies accelerate unvested stock awards after a death, which by itself can amount to tens of millions of dollars. Some promise giant posthumous severance payouts, supercharged pensions or even a continuation of executives' salaries or bonuses for years after they're dead.