Only one person from finance-Blackstone Group Inc. Tom Rutledge, the CEO of Charter Communications Inc., is third. “And in many sectors, like tech, I think it has largely gotten a pass.”Īpple Inc.’s Tim Cook ranks second, the index shows, mostly thanks to an equity grant he got in 2011. “While excessive compensation might be most dangerous at Wall Street firms because of the systemic risk, sky-high pay throughout corporate America encourages many types of socially and environmentally damaging behavior,” said Sarah Anderson, who directs the Global Economy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies.
became one of the world’s most valuable firms.īut as the coronavirus pandemic lays bare the country’s economic inequalities, critics again point out the reality obscured by the rebounding stock market: An economy that’s working extraordinarily well for some but less so for many others.
The money stems from the pay deal he scored a couple of years ago: A promise of a haul in the tens of billions of dollars if Tesla Inc. for 2019 with $595.3 million, according to the Bloomberg Pay Index. No one embodies this better than Elon Musk, the space and electric-car titan who was the highest-paid executive in the U.S.
It’s a small price to pay, companies lavishing those lofty compensation packages say, as long as their stock prices keep going up. Rightly or wrongly, Wall Street CEOs are still excoriated as greedy fat cats who exemplify everything that’s wrong with executive pay.īut look around corporate America these days, and you’ll find any number of executives, particularly in tech, taking home far more than those bankers ever made-even during the boom years before the financial crisis-without a fraction of the scrutiny or the outrage.