This CEO Makes 3,000 Times More Than His Workers

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published May 1, 11:30AM EDT

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This CEO Makes 3,000 Times More Than His Workers — © cisco_pics / Flickr

The debate over CEO pay is decades long. Boards believe their chief executive officers have skills that cannot be replaced. Shareholders and workers believe that annual compensation, which can go into the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, can never be justified, mainly if the company’s workers are paid very little. (Here is a CEO who made 2,000 times more than his employees.)
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Recently, shareholders have been able to vote on executive pay. However, these votes rarely succeed in changing pay. Investors and shareholders did have a small victory in 2017. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission began to require that CEO pay be compared to the median compensation of those who work at the companies they run. CEOs at many public corporations are paid hundreds of times more than their employees, based on these median figures. This information is put into filings made to the SEC.
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Based on 2022 data provided so far for S&P 500 companies, according to AI-driven SEC data company MyLogIQ, David Goeckeler, the CEO at Western Digital, made 3,332 times the median pay of his workers. His pay was $32,137,338. The median pay of workers, some located overseas, was $9,644. Of Western Digital’s 62,500 employees, about 86% were located in Asia. That is not much of an excuse for the extraordinary pay package.
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Western Digital’s stock has performed horribly over the past two years, which raises the question of why Goeckeler has been paid so well. Shares have fallen 52% over that period. Except for a few upticks, the drop has been steady. Goeckeler has a problem with Wall Street analysts as well. According to Yahoo! Finance, the recommendation rating for the stock is 2.5 out of a maximum of 5.
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Goeckeler is an example of why, from time to time, the criticism of CEO pay grows louder.

Data provided by MyLogIQ, the AI-driven SEC database company.

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.