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ceo worker pay gap
Why Do Wealthy CEOs Love Trump? He’s Distracting From Their Own Grift
Corporate CEO paychecks continuing to go gangbusters while the corporations these execs run are—at best—just treading water.
Mar 20, 2025
Every day’s headlines now seem to bombard us with ever more outrageous Trumpian antics. Who could have possibly imagined, for instance, that a president of the United States would turn the White House lawn into a Tesla auto showroom?
But these antics actually do serve a useful social and political purpose—for President Donald Trump’s fellow deep pockets and the corporations they run. Trump’s kleptocratic arrogance and audacity have shoved the institutionalized thievery of Corporate America’s ever-grasping top execs off into the shadows.
Those shadows could hardly be more welcome. American corporate executive compensation, as the business journal Fortune has just detailed, is now “surging amid a roaring bonus rebound.”
Heads CEOs win, in other words, tails they never lose.
One example: Tyson Foods CEO Donnie King has seen his annual executive rewards leap from $13 million in 2023 to $22.7 million in 2024. To keep King smiling, Tyson’s board of directors has also extended his CEO contract into 2027 and guaranteed him “a post-employment perk that includes 75 hours of personal use of the company jet as long as he sticks around on the board.”
And what in the way of wonders has Tyson’s King been working to earn all this? Not much, concludes a new Compensation Advisory Partners analysis. Anyone who had $100 invested in Tyson shares at the end of fiscal 2019 today holds a nest egg worth just $80.54. Tyson’s most typical workers aren’t doing particularly well either. They took home $43,417 in 2024, 525 times less than the annual compensation that CEO Donnie King pocketed.
Over at Moderna, Big Pharma’s newest big kid on the corporate block, chief exec Stéphane Bancel saw his 2024 annual pay jump 16.4% over his 2023 compensation despite a 53% drop in Moderna’s annual revenue.
Back in 2022, at Covid-19’s height, Bancel personally collected over $392 million exercising stacks of the stock options he had been sitting upon. Between that year’s start and 2024’s close, Moderna shares plummeted from just under $254 each to under $42.
Moderna’s transition to our post-Covid world, the Moderna board acknowledges, has been “more complex than anticipated.” That complexity, the board apparently believes, in no way justifies denying Bancel his rightful place among Big Pharma’s top-earning CEOs. Bancel’s near $20-million 2024 payday is keeping him well within hailing distance of all his Big Pharma peers.
How can corporate CEO paychecks be continuing to go gangbusters while the corporations these execs run are—at best—just treading water? Lauren Peek, a partner at Compensation Advisory Partners and a co-author of the firm’s latest CEO pay analysis, has an explanation.
Corporate board compensation committees, Peek observes, want to keep their top execs adequately incentivized. These board panels simply cannot bear the sight of their CEOs getting down in the dumps. So what do these panels do? They exclude from their final CEO pay decisions any negative economic factors that CEOs can’t directly determine. But these same corporate panels never take into account unexpected positive economic factors that their CEOs had no hand in creating.
Heads CEOs win, in other words, tails they never lose.
Among those winners: Disney chief exec Robert Iger. His 2024 total pay jumped to $41 million, up nearly $10 million from his 2023 compensation. Disney’s total shareholder return, over that same year, didn’t even reach halfway up the total return that Disney’s peer companies recorded.
Disney hardly rates as an outlier among the 50 major publicly traded corporations that the recently released Compensation Advisory Partners report puts under the microscope. The median revenue growth of these 50 firms dropped to 1.6% in 2024, less than half their 2023 rate. Their earnings remained virtually flat as well. But their CEO compensation climbed an average 9%.
“With financial performance largely flat across these early Fortune 500 filers,” notes an HR Grapevine analysis of the Compensation Advisory Partners findings, “board-level decisions to maintain or raise executive bonuses may prompt further scrutiny from investors and stakeholders alike.”
“For ‘shop-floor’ employees,” adds the HR Grapevine, “news of CEO wage hikes despite average financial performances will undoubtedly prompt a good deal of rumination about their own levels of compensation.”
Equilar, an information services firm specializing in corporate pay, has also been busy analyzing the latest trends in CEO remuneration. Equilar’s latest look at corner-office compensation has found that median CEO pay within the corporations that make up the Equilar 500 jumped up from $12 million in 2020 to $16.5 million last year.
CEO-worker pay gaps have increased even more significantly. At the median Equilar 500 corporation, CEOs pocketed 186.5 times the pay of their most typical workers in 2020 and 306 times that pay in 2024. At America’s larger corporations—those companies sitting at the 75th percentile of the Equilar 500—CEOs made 307.5 times their typical worker pay in 2020 and last year collected 527 times more.
A key driver of this ever-widening CEO-worker pay gap? The sinking compensation going to typical corporate workers, as Equilar’s Joyce Chen concluded last week in an analysis for the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance. These median workers took home $66,321 in 2020, but just $57,299 last year.
But top execs aren’t just shortchanging workers at pay-time. They’re also pressuring those workers to squeeze and defraud clients and customers at every opportunity, as former Wells Fargo bank manager and investigator Kieran Cuadras has just vividly detailed.
Nearly a decade ago, Cuadras relates, a mammoth phony accounts scandal at Wells Fargo led to fines totaling $20 million against the bank’s then-CEO John Stumpf. But those fines, she points out, hardly made a dent in the estimated $130 million that Stumpf “walked away with in compensation when he resigned.”
Wells Fargo’s current CEO, Charles Scharf, appears to be doing his best to follow in Stumpf’s footsteps. Scharf’s gutted risk and complaint departments are cutting corners “to create the illusion of fewer complaints.” The reality: Those departments are closing complaint cases prematurely. In 2024, these and other sneaky moves helped Scharf pocket a sweet $31.2 million .
Our nation’s political leaders, says Wells Fargo employee and customer advocate Kieran Cuadras, need “to step up and do something about a CEO pay system that rewards executives with obscenely large paychecks for practices that harm workers and the broader economy.”
Where to start that stepping up? Lawmakers ought to be levying new taxes on corporations “with huge gaps between their CEO and worker pay,” Cuadras posits, and increasing an already existing tax on stock buybacks.
Moves like these, she astutely sums up, “would encourage companies to focus on long-term prosperity and stability rather than simply making wealthy executives and shareholders even richer.”
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How to Reduce the CEO-Worker Pay Gap? Impose Consequences
One promising possible consequence that U.S. lawmakers could pursue is a tax hike on corporations that pay their CEOs at 50 times or more than what they pay their most typical employees.
Jun 20, 2024
Some 87% of Americans, polling tells us, consider today’s growing gap between U.S. CEO and worker pay a serious cause for national concern.
That gap has become a cause for global concern as well. CEO-worker pay gaps in the United States, as data in a new Altrata report make clear, are essentially cementing in place our world’s current “colossal” maldistribution of income and wealth.
In the decade ahead, the Altrata report forecasts, more than a quarter of the world’s wealthy worth at least $5 million will be passing on “almost $31 trillion” to their nearest and dearest. Some 64% of that $31 trillion will be coming from the world’s richest of the rich, those “ultra wealthy” deep pockets individually worth over $30 million.
We need more than disclosure, posit advocates for fairer corporate compensation. We need consequences.
Corporate executives, Altrata calculates, will make up over 71% of those global “ultra wealthy.” Another 21% of these ultras will be entrepreneurs who either founded or co-founded their own business empires. And nearly half of all these corporate execs and entrepreneurs, add Altrata’s researchers, will be deep-pocketed souls who call the United States home, “a testament” to America’s continuing status as the nation with by far the “world’s largest” population of ultra wealthy.
In other words, the world will see over the next 10 years “the transfer of a staggering level of wealth,” and American top corporate execs will be sitting right in the center of that transfer. The billions these execs have amassed since the early 1980s—the years when CEO pay started soaring—will be vastly expanding the ranks of those who hold massive amounts of inherited wealth.
None of this, of course, should come as much of a surprise. CEO pay levels in the United States have now been making headlines for well over four decades. And this year those executive pay stats are showing what The New York Times has dubbed a “new wrinkle.”
Over the past half-dozen years, under the authority of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, the federal Securities and Exchange Commission has been requiring publicly traded corporations to annually disclose the ratio of their CEO pay to their median employee pay. The value of the stock rewards in that CEO pay has up until now reflected the share value of those stock rewards when the CEOs received them.
Share values can, of course, increase substantially over time. The original SEC pay-ratio regulations didn’t require corporations to figure those increased stock values into their CEO-worker pay ratios. The new SEC rules do require companies to “disclose how much CEO stock holdings increase when the market rises.”
The difference between the original and “new wrinkle” approaches can be substantial.
Under the original approach, America’s 10 most highly paid CEOs last year collected between 510 and 3,769 times what their company’s most typical employee earned, with the year’s top-paid chief exec collecting $199 million.
Under the SEC’s “new wrinkle” accounting approach, all the 10 highest-paid U.S. chief execs in 2023 saw their compensation run over $199 million, with 4 of the top 10, analysts at Equilar calculate, making over $600 million and two more making over $300 million.
By either calculation, of course, contemporary U.S. CEOs are making fantastically more than their CEO counterparts back in the middle of the 20th century. In the 1960s, the Economic Policy Institute has pointed out, chief execs at major U.S. corporations seldom pocketed much more than 20 times the pay that went to their workers. Since then, the CEO-worker pay gap has quadrupled—and then quadrupled again.
The “new wrinkle” approach the SEC has added into the annual pay disclosure mix aims to give the American public a more accurate sense of just how outrageously wide the CEO-worker pay gap now stretches. The new numbers, disclosure advocates seem to believe, will do a better job of shaming corporate boards into more compensation common sense.
The original SEC approach to disclosure certainly didn’t do much shaming. Corporations that have disclosed their CEO-worker pay ratios under that original approach have not seen “any significant change in the level of CEO pay,” notes the University of Colorado business school’s Bryce Schonberger, a co-author of a recent chief executive pay study.
But the “new wrinkle” approach, unfortunately, doesn’t seem at all likely to produce much “significant change” either. We need more than disclosure, posit advocates for fairer corporate compensation. We need consequences. What might those consequences be? Some of the nation’s top CEO pay experts explored that question earlier this week at the U.S. Senate Budget Committee’s first-ever hearing on executive pay overreach.
Among the witnesses: Sarah Anderson, the Institute For Policy Studies Global Economy Program director. One national poll last month, Anderson told the Senate panel, asked likely voters about a promising possible consequence that lawmakers could pursue: a tax hike on corporations that pay their CEOs at 50 times or more than what they pay their most typical employees.
Some 80% of those polled, noted Anderson, supported that idea, “including large majorities in every political group.”
Taxes on corporations with outrageously wide CEO-worker pay differentials, Anderson added, give corporations with huge internal pay disparities two basic choices: either narrow their pay gaps or face a bigger IRS bill at tax time.
“A company where half of employees earn less than $60,000, for instance, would have to limit CEO compensation to no more than $3 million or raise worker pay to avoid higher taxes,” Anderson explained in her testimony. “In 2022, average S&P 500 CEO pay hit $16.7 million.”
Could moves like taxing corporations that pay their top execs far more than their workers gain any traction in Congress? Maybe. Some lawmakers already back that notion. Count the chair of the Senate Budget Committee, Rhode Island’s Sheldon Whitehouse, as one of those lawmakers.
“Our tax code is corrupted and rotten, turned upside down for special interests,” the senator charged at his panel’s June 12 hearing.
What can we do about that corruption? Whitehouse advanced a number of fixes. Among them: Raise taxes on “companies that pay their CEOs more than 50 times what they pay their average worker.”
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Tesla Shareholders Approve $45 Billion Pay Package for Musk, Reject Pro-Union Measure
"It's an order of magnitude more egregious than the most egregious ever dared to ask for," an expert said of the pay package. The vote comes after Tesla fired thousands of workers.
Jun 14, 2024
Tesla shareholders on Thursday approved a pay package for CEO Elon Musk worth more than $45 billion while rejecting a pro-union measure that sought to prevent the company from interfering with worker organizing.
The shareholder vote on Musk's pay package, the exact value of which fluctuates with the company's share price, was a response to a January court ruling that voided the package because the Tesla board that had issued it had too many personal and financial ties to Musk. The CEO's supporters expect the vote to strengthen his legal case for the money.
The unsuccessful pro-union proposal, which would have required the company to respect workers' right to assemble, had been brought by Scandinavian investors acting in solidarity with Tesla mechanics in Sweden who've been on strike since October. Tesla pays less than other carmakers and Musk has been openly anti-union, even saying that he disagrees with the idea of unions.
The shareholder votes came after the company fired 14,000 workers—more than 10% of its global staff—in April and then made further cuts shortly thereafter. More Perfect Union, a nonprofit newsroom, drew attention to the layoffs in reacting to news of the shareholder votes.
Calling the pay package "outrageous," the newsroom wrote on social media that "the vote allows Musk to further enrich himself, even as Tesla falters as a company and fires thousands of workers."
BREAKING: Tesla shareholders just voted to give Elon Musk $56 billion.
This outrageous pay package is over $55 billion more than the CEO of Google gets.
The vote allows Musk to further enrich himself, even as Tesla falters as a company and fires thousands of workers.
— More Perfect Union (@MorePerfectUS) June 13, 2024
Other organizations also voiced their disapproval at the size of Musk's pay package.
"It's an order of magnitude more egregious than the most egregious ever dared to ask for," Andrew Behar, CEO of As You Sow, a shareholder advocacy nonprofit, said of the pay package, The Christian Science Monitor reportedon Thursday.
The $45 billion pay package would come in the form of Tesla stock, taking Musk's ownership stake in the company from about 13% to roughly 20.5%, The New York Timesreported.
"Working class people with pensions invested in Tesla could pay for the richest man on Earth to get even richer," More Perfect Unionwrote on social media last week.
Musk's contempt for unions is not just rhetorical: He is making a push in the courts to defang the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), an effort that would "gut" fundamental New Deal workers' rights legislation, according toThe Nation.
At a plant in Buffalo, Tesla management fired dozens of workers last year after one of them informed Musk of plans to organize a union. Last month, the NLRB filed a complaint against Tesla for interfering with union organizing at the Buffalo plant.
There's a strong union tradition in Scandinavia, where many workers from other sectors have acted in solidarity with the striking mechanics. "Postal workers refused to deliver license plates for Tesla cars, dockers to unload Teslas from ships, and cleaners to scrub the firm’s showrooms," The Economistreported.
Union leaders see the strike as a way of preserving the "Swedish Model" that has undergirded the country's relative high quality of life and shared prosperity for decades. But organized labor is not yet as strong in emerging green industries, leading to concerns about low wages and meager benefits, the Timesreported.
Thursday's shareholder votes for the pay package and against the pro-union proposal were both lopsided, a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing showed, indicating strong support for Musk's agenda.
In another Musk-influenced vote, shareholders agreed to move the Tesla's corporate registration to from Delaware to Texas—an effort to avoid the Delaware court system, which Musk believes has treated the company unfairly. The pay package case will remain in Delaware courts.
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