The Most Outrageous CEO Salaries and Perks

In this interpretation, CEO compensation is being set by the market for “skills” or “talent,” not by managerial power or rent-seeking behavior.6 This explanation lies in contrast to that offered by Bebchuk and Fried and Clifford , who claim that the long-term increase in CEO pay is a result of managerial power. Over the 2009–2020 period CEO pay resumed its upward trajectory and the 130.3% surge in realized CEO compensation brought the ratio to 351-to-1, above its 2007 level. Though the realized CEO-to-worker compensation ratio remains below the value achieved in 2000 at the peak of a stock market bubble, it is far higher than it was in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and most of the 1990s.

A 2006 congressional investigation found median CEO salary 67 percent higher in Fortune 250 companies where the hired compensation consultants had the largest conflicts of interest than in companies without such conflicted consultants. Since then the SEC has issued rules «designed to promote the independence of compensation committee members, consultants and advisers» and prevent conflict of interest in consulting. Unions that might once have walked out to protest giant executive bonuses have been devastated by corporate anti-union campaigns and have lost most of their political influence. As of 2002, about one-quarter of CEOs negotiated a post-retirement consulting relationship with their old firm despite the fact that few CEOs have been known to seek advice from their predecessors. At least one observer—Frank Glassner, CEO of Compensation Design Group—explains the practice as «disguised severance», rather than money in exchange for useful service to the company. One of the few big firms that did disclose its executive pension liability—GE—reported $1.13 billion for the year 2000. Still, when it comes to startup CEO pay, our data reveals some good news.

What Do Chief Executive Officer (CEO)s Do?

Increases to the Base Salary shall be based upon the Board of Directors’ annual evaluation of Executive’s performance and compensation analysis. CEOs, senior executives and public-company directors, helping you grow your companies, build your communities and strengthen society. Note the median bonus was $139k and median option grant had a value of $76k. It’s not unreasonable to take a bonus and it’s also expected that a founder will be granted stock as the Company matures and becomes more successful, especially if their salary is low. The award included 13.8 million time-based shares issued in March 2021, which began vesting over four years starting at the end of 2021.

• Base Salary and Benefits During the Employment Period, the Executive’s base salary shall be $240,000 per annum (the “Base Salary”), which Base Salary shall be payable in regular installments in accordance with the Company’s general payroll practices and subject to withholding and other payroll taxes.
• NYSE and NASDAQ stock exchanges also developed new «listing requirements» for the committees of the board of directors that nominate directors for election by shareholders.
• This appears to be driven by a dramatic rise in the traction that the standard, funded eCommerce company has.
• We’ve found that CEOs in some industries have higher average salaries than others.

Boards of directors should rise to the occasion, «to do their jobs», provide true oversight, better leadership, greater effectiveness, and so on. In mid-2000 Procter & Gamble gave ousted CEO Durk Jager $9.5 million , even though he lasted only 17 months on the job and oversaw a 50 per cent drop in the value of P&G stock, a loss of $70 billion in shareholder value.» In March CEO Salary 2009 it was revealed that insurance giant American International Group, a recipient of a $180 billion government rescue package, had bestowed $165 million in bonuses to high-level employees in its most troubled financial unit. According to Fortune magazine, through the 1950s, 60s, and part of the 70s, CEO pay actually grew more slowly than the pay of average workers.

Glassdoor Economist Pay Overview

This is problematic since this growing earning power of CEOs has been driving income growth at the very top, a key dynamic in the overall growth of inequality. Burdensome government regulation, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley law, prevents publicly traded firms from competing with private firms such as hedge funds where the average compensation for the top 25 managers in 2004 was more than 20 times as much as the average CEO ($251 million). In the wake of the accounting scandals the Sarbanes–Oxley Act was passed in mid-2002 to improve financial disclosures from corporations and prevent accounting fraud, but also involved executive compensation. It banned loans by companies to directors and executives, (although existing loans, worth billions of dollars were not called in); included a «clawback» provision to force the return of executives stock sale profits and bonuses if the money was earned by overstating earnings or otherwise misleading investors. If directors fail to work in the interest of shareholders, shareholders have the power to sue to stop an executive pay package.

Executives generally negotiate a customized employment contract with documentation spelling out the compensation, and taking into account government regulations and tax law.Some types of their pay (gratuitous payments, post-retirement consulting contracts), are unique to their occupation. Other types are not, but generally make up a higher (e.g. stock options) or lower (e.g. salary) proportion of their pay than that of their underlings. Most of the private sector economy in the United States is made up of such firms where management and ownership are separate, and there are no controlling shareholders.

Average Total Cash Compensation

According to a Morningstar analysis of C-suite pay, from 2015 to 2019 the gender pay gap for CEOs had been narrowing. However, during the COVID pandemic in 2020 the pay gap expanded again throughout corporate America, and our research on startup companies also reflects that trend.

• According to Harvard professors of law Lucian Arye Bebchuk and Jesse M. Fried, «flawed compensation arrangements» in American corporations have become «widespread, persistent, and systemic».
• Encourage long term thinking and discourage the pursuit of short-term profits.Extend the vesting period of executives’ stock and options.
• Whatever the metric, CEO compensation is independent of business performance.
• The court found the decision to pay Ovitz was simply one of the inherent risks shareholders take as owners for which businesses cannot be held liable, since Ovtiz’s poor performance did not rise to the level of `malfeasance`, or a «breach of fiduciary duty and waste of corporate assets».
• Unlike «measuring how many bricks a worker can lay in an hour,» success is difficult to determine over the short-to-medium term («Enron looked like a fabulously successful company to most of the world» for many years), and depends on many factors outside the chief executive’s control.
• The Basic Salary shall be prorated for the month in which employment of Executive by the Company commences or terminates, and for any Employment Year that is less than twelve months in duration.

Routinely misused and abused, surveys contribute to the common ills of corporate compensation policy. Surveys that report average compensation across industries help inflate salaries, as everyone tries to be above average . Surveys that relate pay to company sales encourage systems that tie compensation to size and growth, not performance and value. Surveys that rank the country’s highest paid executives stir public outrage, raise legislative eyebrows, and provide emotional justification for increased demands in labor negotiations.

CEO Salary

VCs expect startup CEO salaries to be “just right,” but often provide limited guidance on what that actually means. Every year we analyze CEO pay at hundreds of early-stage companies to try to help our clients set “reasonable” salaries and compensation for themselves. Other well-known corporations whose CEOs appear on the worst-incentives list include Chevron, Johnson & Johnson, Eastman Kodak, and IBM.

Critics complain that not only is this failure to punish poor performance a disincentive to increase stockholder value, but that the usual explanation offered for these payouts—to provide risk-averse execs with insurance against termination—doesn’t make sense. The typical CEO is not anticipating many years of income stream since the usual executive contract is only three years. Furthermore, only 2 percent of firms in the S&P 500 reduce any part https://simple-accounting.org/ of the severance package once the executive finds another employer. And if employers are worried about coaxing risk-averse potential employees, why are executives the only ones provided with this treatment? «Given executives’ accumulated wealth and generous retirement benefits they commonly receive after leaving the firm, they are likely to be, if anything, less risk-averse and better able to insure themselves than most other employees.

Average startup CEO salary is $150,000 in 2022

Most early-stage, non-CEO founders are often paid about the same amount as the CEOs, so founders can use this to estimate compensation as well. Salaries, bonuses, and stock options can be structured so as to provide big rewards for superior performance and big penalties for poor performance. Yet these “bonuses” don’t generate big fluctuations in CEO compensation.

• Based on our analysis of the data, this small difference can be explained by the fact that the female CEOs in our dataset are predominantly running earlier stage companies.
• This premium is simply how much higher the hourly wages of workers with a (four-year) college degree are relative to hourly wages of workers with only a high school diploma.
• It is possible that a “secondary earner,” or spouse, has income earned as an executive or as a financial-sector worker.
• Since taking the helm in 2011, Cook has grown Apple into the biggest company in the world — its $2.62 trillion market cap is nearly double that of America’s second-biggest company, Microsoft.
• According to Lucid’s SEC filing, the company valued his total compensation at $566 million, one of the biggest CEO pay packages of 2021.

In 2005, the dismissal of a well-publicized, decade-long lawsuit to overturn a huge severance payout demonstrated the obstacles shareholders faced attempting to control executive pay using the courts. The Delaware Court of Chancery refused to overturn a $140 million severance package ($300,000 for every day as president of the company) paid to Michael Ovitz when he was forced to resign by Disney as its president in 1996.