This CEO Made 2,900 Times More Than His Employees

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Apr 7, 9:43AM EDT

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This CEO Made 2,900 Times More Than His Employees — © Courtesy of Paycom

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has long required public corporations to disclose the compensation of their top officers. The debate about whether chief executive officers are paid too much has gone on for decades. Many investors object to high CEO pay, which often runs into the tens of millions of dollars. Boards of directors claim that good CEOs are hard to find and that they have responsibilities for tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of workers.

Last year, one American CEO made over $200 million, which is 2,963 more than the median compensation of his workers. According to the SEC, “The median employee’s annual total compensation was $71,259 in 2020” at the company he runs. He was also the only CEO to make over $100 million, according to an exclusive analysis of the pay of 294 public company CEOs done by MyLogIQ, which uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to analyze public company data.

Chad Richison is the president and chief executive officer of Paycom, which he founded in 1998. Its primary business is payroll processing. Last year, Richison made an extraordinary $211,131,206. This included his base salary, stock awards, short-term incentives and other compensation. The latter category includes the use of corporate aircraft, personal security and car lease payments. Richison made $21,138,558 in 2019.

Paycom posted mediocre results in 2020. While revenue rose to $841 million from $738 million in 2019, earnings fell to $2.49 per share from $3.14. When the company reported earnings, Richison did not address this decline. “Our strong finish to 2020 further validates our differentiated employee usage strategy and the real-time ROI it provides businesses,” he said. It was not a strong finish at the bottom line.
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Richison did deliver for shareholders in 2020. Paycom’s stock rose 66%, compared to 46% for the Nasdaq. Even if Paycom’s fourth-quarter earnings were not stellar, they did beat the Wall St. consensus estimates.

Special thanks to MyLogIQ.

Click here to see which CEO made 300 times more than his workers did last year.
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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.