Highest-paid CEOs in America
Among the most hotly contested debates in America is what to make of the vast discrepancy between the salaries of the country's top-earning CEOs and the average workers at their companies.
CEO compensation rose nearly 1,045% between 1978 and 2022, according to a report from the Economic Policy Institute released in September 2023. Their findings showed that CEOs made 344 times as much as a typical worker in 2022, a massive spike from the 21-1 ratio in 1965. Amid the United Auto Workers strike in the fall of 2023, for example, NPR reported that General Motors CEO Mary Barra's 2022 salary was 362 times that of the median GM employee.
That ratio widens even further when looking at companies with lower median wages. In an in-depth analysis of the 100 S&P 500 corporations with the lowest median worker pay levels in 2022, the Institute for Policy Studies found that the average CEO-worker pay gap was 603-to-1.
To see which CEOs make the most money in the U.S., Stacker analyzed data from the AFL-CIO to determine the 20 highest-paid CEOs nationwide. All pay data is for 2023. Any CEOs who did not still hold their position as of August 2024 were excluded.
You'll notice some of the biggest names in business, like Tesla CEO Elon Musk (who's currently in a legal battle regarding his $56 billion pay package) and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg (whose salary is technically $1 per year), are not on the list. But who did make the cut? Read on to see how much the chief executives of top companies made.
