Big Company CEOs Make Almost 200 Times Their Workers

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Jun 5, 6:50AM EDT

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Big Company CEOs Make Almost 200 Times Their Workers — © Man holding Money in hand at Black Background, Man receive a lot Money from Trading, Business Success Concept. (Shutterstock.com) by Jester-Flim

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A recent analysis shows that, across the S&P 500, CEOs made 196 times what their workers did last year.

Each year, there is a list of public company chief executive officers who make several hundred times as much money as their workers. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission requires these corporations to compare CEO pay to the median compensation of all their workers. For 2023, across the S&P 500, CEOs made 196 times what their workers did.

This year’s Equilar | Associated Press CEO Pay Study showed that pay across the 500 CEOs rose 12.6% to $16.3 million. In most cases, the largest part of pay packages are stock options. The authors wrote, “In line with the average CEO pay package, stock awards made up approximately 70% of total compensation in 2023.”

The highest-paid CEO on the list was Broadcom’s Hock Tan at $162 million. The highest-paid woman was Lisa Su of AMD, who earned $30 million. Of the 341 CEOs in the study’s universe, 25 were women. Female CEOs did well. “Overall, the women in this year’s study were awarded a median pay package of $17.6 million in 2023, 7.7% more than the index median,” the report states.

The debate over whether CEOs should make so much more than their workers will continue as long as the data is available. Occasionally, shareholders have tried to get CEO pay onto proxies, hoping that shareholders will revolt. It virtually never happens.

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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.