There are high and lows aplenty at the moment in the world of business, especially in the technology industry where lay-offs have been brutal and widespread. Despite the turbulence, some of the world’s top CEOs are pulling in more than $1 billion/ year.
An analytics company, Equilar, teamed up with the New York Times to look at the data from almost 4000 publicly traded US companies and has published a list of the highest earning CEOs in the US.
The names of the list represent asset management companies, a pharmaceutical giant and there are a couple of big name tech ventures in there too.
So who made it to the top five?
The metric by which the earnings were ranked in “total compensation granted”. This includes “executives’ salaries, bonuses, perks and stock options, among other factors”, explains CNBC. For the CEO of asset management venture, TPG, that package was a huge $198.7 million. Jon Winkelried has been at the helm of the company since 2021 but joined from Goldman Sachs where he was co-president.
For the second place spot, we are staying in the world of finance. Harvey Schwartz, CEO of global investment firm, the Carlyle Group, earned $187 million. The American businessman is at the head of the world’s fifth biggest private equity firm and, like Winkelried, joined from Goldman Sachs.
In the third and fourth spots are Hock Tan with $161.8 million and Nikesh Arora with $151.4 million. Malaysian-born Chinese-American, Tan is CEO of global tech venture, Broadcom, and has been since March 2006. Arora has headed up network and cloud security provider, Palo Alto Networks, since June 2018, and, according to Bloomberg, is worth a mind-blowing $830 million.
In fifth place is the only woman in the top ten and it is Sue Nabi, CEO of cosmetics giant, Coty. She boasts nearly 30 years in the beauty industry, including a spell as president of the Lancôme brand.
The other metric
But the ranking also has another metric and that is “compensation actually paid”, which takes into account stock holdings.
It will come as little surprise that it is Elon Musk, owner of Tesla, X and Space X, who tops the list when this metric is used. He earned around $1.4 billion in 2023; and this was despite the huge upheavals at X after he took over.
Where are the other tech billionaires?
The list doesn’t include big names in the technology world who are well-publicised to have huge fortunes. Where is Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg? Well, he is, on paper, his company’s lowest page employee, earning just $1/ annum. Instead, according to Fortune, he received $24.4 million in “other compensation” in 2023.
Putting pay into content
The Equilar report adds that CEOs make nearly 200 times more than the average worker and their salaries rose nearly 13% last year. The gap is widening too between what the CEOs and the average workers take home.
