Tech companies often spend millions of dollars in protecting their patents and intellectual properties. Take the example of the ongoing battle between Apple and Qualcomm for instance, what started as an intellectual property dispute has now extended to the point where Apple has been forbidden from selling certain iPhone models in Germany and in China. And now a new report highlights the amount these tech companies spend in protecting their chief executive officers.

Apple, for instance, spend $310,981 in protecting its CEO Tim Cook in the past year. This amount is comparable with what Google spend in 2018 in security of its former chief executive Eric Schmidt. The company's expenditure in the security of Schmidt for the past fiscal stood at $296,353, Wired reported.

Interestingly, the amount spend by Apple in the safety of Cook is significantly less than what other companies, including Google, Amazon, Oracle and even Inte spend on the security of their CEOs. Google, for example, spend $637,538 in protecting its CEO Sundar Pichai in the past year. He was topped by Intel, which spend nearly $1.2 million on the security of its former CEO Brian Krzanich.

Oracle and Amazon, on the other hand, spend $1.6 million each in the security of their CEOs Larry Ellison and Jeff Bezos.

However, on the top of the ladder was Facebook, which spend a whopping $7.3 million in protecting its CEO and chairman Mark Zuckerberg in 2018, which is roughly the same the company spend in protecting him a year before that. As per the report, last year the social media giant told its investors that it expects to spend nearly $10 million in protecting Zuckerberg in the coming year, which would include safeguarding his home and his personal security detail.

Facebook's past year was full of scandulous incidents. Right from the Cambridge Analytica controversy, which led to Congressional and Parliamentary hearings in the US and in Europe, to data breaches that hit millions of Facebook users, the year was full of a lot of ups and downs. And so in light of recent events, the company spending millions of dollars on protecting its founder makes sense.

However, Zuckerberg is not the only top executive Facebook spend millions of dollars in protecting. The company also spend $2.6 million in protecting its chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, which is more than what many tech giants spend in securing their CEOs.