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After he reaped $197.5 million last week by exercising long-held stock options, one might assume that Walt Disney Chairman Michael D. Eisner would soon be crowned by the business press as 1992’s top-paid executive.

Turns out, it probably won’t happen--at least for now.

Eisner exercised options that he was granted in 1984 as an incentive when he was hired to turn around Disney. Doing so now avoids corporate and personal tax increases expected from the incoming Clinton Administration.

But Eisner’s transaction occurred two months after Disney closed out its fiscal year on Sept. 30.

A Disney spokesman confirms that the gains won’t show up under Eisner’s compensation in Disney’s upcoming proxy statement (although his stock ownership will reflect the nearly 2 million shares he kept after exercising the options).

Unhealthy Development

Former radical-turned-entrepreneur Jerry Rubin, now a Los Angeles distributor of Omnitrition health products, is upset that he’s one of the defendants in a lawsuit brought by a former Omnitrition distributor who says he lost $2,800 through a “classic pyramid scheme.”

Omnitrition is a “multilevel marketing” company, in which distributors make money when they recruit other distributors. The company denies the allegations, and last week requested that the lawsuit be thrown out.

Rubin argues that he was named because he’s famous. He says he’s just a distributor, never met the plaintiff and that the company’s policy of buying back unsold products protects distributors from losses. He adds that the San Francisco law firm of Lieff, Cabraser & Heimann, which filed the lawsuit, picks on multilevel firms, which Rubin believes are a growth industry.

Lawyer Richard Heimann says Rubin was named because he’s a high-profile Omnitrition promoter. He concedes that his firm has sued similar companies, adding that he believes that many of them resemble illegal “chain letters.”

More Work for Cher

Cable giant Tele-Communications Inc. last week disclosed that it will employ digital video technology that could result in more than 500 television channels.

So what’s in it for us? More infomercials, no doubt.

Steve Dworman, publisher of Infomercial Marketing Report newsletter in Los Angeles, says that if you average all channels together, they probably offer about two hours a day of infomercials, those sales pitches made to look like regular programs.

That means that we can look forward to about 1,000 hours a day of infomercials.

Briefly . . .

Former Security Pacific Chief Executive Robert H. Smith, who served briefly as BankAmerica’s president after the two banks combined this year, sold 80% of his BankAmerica stock for $1.9 million . . . World-class nickname: L.A. Weekly has dubbed businessman/mayoral candidate Richard Riordan “L.A.’s Ross Perot” . . . A lingerie shop has opened in San Francisco International Airport.