CEO pay at top US companies accelerates at fastest pace in 4 years
ft.com
ft.com
Of the examples is the CEO of Starbucks, unless they started having robots as baristas, I feel like there are parts of the workforce they cannot just "replace with AI", compared to many technology companies.
Baristas are fine as you said but yes starbucks is firing 1 in 10 office workers this year.
The LLMs trained on our work are replacing us while the ppl up top get higher pay, all is right with the world.
He stated his plan with Starbucks is focused on “theater” and in person service. Doesn’t sound like coffee bot to me.
It’s simply a way to drive down wages and increase profits. Every time the “recovery” cycle happens, less jobs are added and wages are the same or lower, either literally or because the job has been expanded with 2x the expectations.
edit: have they ever considered prison?
If they hold onto it, then prices stabilize, the value of the dollar temporarily goes up. At some point these rich people spend all of it somehow.
And if you, as a person that demands more pay, then just ask. If you get a no, quit. It's as simple as that. No one should be forced to do anything different. I wouldn't ask you to give up half your salary?
You speak from a position of privilege. It is not as simple as that. It is expensive to exist in this current day, and quitting a job when you don't have another source of income lined up, is not smart; or doable for the majority of the working class. Bills and debt collectors don't care about your moral high ground.
Yet, what you clearly observe is ...?
And this tells you what about the system and its intent? Can you see mow, why so many are concerned?
Tolerate? We’re cheering it on. We just voted in a unified government to hose the poor to give the rich a tax cut.
https://www.axios.com/2025/06/26/trump-harris-latino-voters-...
I think that the way to win in American politics is to tell whatever group who you want to vote for you that you intend to screw them as hard as physically possible.
Americans politics in 2025 can be best summed up with one word: Schadenfreude
American politics is racially depolarising. Democrats absolutely missed this. Pretending a gay business owner and Catholic construction worker will vote the same because they share a skin color and language is not informative.
I've traveled all around the world. There's shitty people everywhere. But in America, the shitty people actively expect good PR and "both sides" and "neutral unbiased pov". And they get it. They are given multiple attempts at a coup. Needless to say, it won't end well.
Note that I do not condone Thompson's murder, I am simply stating the fact that if people could so easily justify something that is usually evidently morally abhorrent is proof enough that this resentment exists and can be exploited.
Any sort of revolution requires sacrifice which the vast majority is not willing to do. That's not only in the USA, it's worldwide. Capitalism killed revolution in rich countries.
Even the French known for their protests and civil unrest can't get meaningful change anymore.
You're right that whoever promises what they want (but won't fight for) will likely win, but very little will change. After all it's still the rich that elect our officials.
The two party system is a great example of how to stop the masses from messing their plans too much. They can pick two candidates that are corporate friendly, finance their campaigns, so it doesn't matter which one wins, they win. Even without the two party system, the financing of politics is what determines this and it's absolutely corrupt.
It's publicly known that corporations blatantly contribute to both sides to ensure that whatever happens they have control over it.
The US had a great example just now: Bernie. He's not even as extreme as he should be IMO but even if people WANTED to vote for him, they couldn't. They had to choose between two corporate candidates. In this case without even a vote (I think the fake "pre-election" the USA does is ridiculously fake, but that's another issue).
If we then add the fact that they own the media and the vast majority of the population can't think for themselves, we have what I described: the rich controls who wins.
No matter the party (americans are obsessed with left/right simplifications), the one constant is that the lives of the rich will get better at the cost of the lives of the poor. Maybe one day folks will understand that. Maybe not.
Nations have solved the “parasitic elite” problem in the past, but those nations are painted as evil nowadays.
Isn't this evidence of billionaires, like other humans, having pet issues they'll pivot over? There are tens of millions of Obama-Trump and Biden-Trump voters.
Even in the French Revolution, when money and people were much less mobile than they are today, the aristocracy as a whole consolidated their wealth.
To the extent anyone wants a revolution in America who isn’t an idiot, it’s the rich.
To be fair, replacing useless elites with good ones, even violently, can be good. But it doesn’t mean the old elites face justice. And it generally takes the revolutionary elite a generation to learn to govern.
Are there no prisons?
/s
Hat tip to Dickens.
Something about our economic system needs to change. I hope it's not prisons and workhouses in the future, but the declining quality of people being voted into our steward class is concerning. Something tells me for some of our elected officials, prisons and workhouses are viable options.
> Brian Niccol, chief executive of Starbucks, was second with $95.8mn in total last year, mostly from stock awards.
These articles are outrage bait. The reason for CEO comp to keep growing is because they’re largely compensated in equity (performance-based compensation), which keeps growing. This tracks with how the S&P 500 has performed over the past few years, partially due to inflation
All equity given to any ceo could, and should, instead be divided amongst the entire org's staff.
Does it really matter why or how the inequality keeps growing? Shouldn't the focus be on that it is increasing, and potential ways of decreasing it instead?
> Niccol’s pay package as an example of the widest pay gap between the top executive and median employee of one of the biggest US companies. Niccol’s annual pay was more than 6,666 times greater than the total pay for the median employee, a part-time barista, who earns about $15,000 a year, according to company filings.
Niccol could be paid in cars, legos or flowers for all I care, it doesn't change the fact that the difference of compensation is 6,666 times.
Money is cheap for the rich, which is also a big factor of why stock markets (and compensations) behave like they do. All signs point down, public infrastructure and cost of living struggles under budget pressure while stocks are at an all time high.
Simply saying, its earned compensation doesnt even tell half the story. I consider it deception.
Not that I'm feeling any rage, I left that unproductive phase a long time ago.
But even so, why cannot we talk about multiple unfair things at the same thing? Not sure how globalization and technology is even relevant when the explicit topic of this submission is about CEO/executive pay at US companies. Why try to take the discussion away from that?
I wasn’t referring directly to you, but in general. “You” in the royal sense. Anyway
> But even so, why cannot we talk about multiple unfair things at the same thing?
Because one of them is a red herring. If you plot median CEO comp of S&P 500 companies to the S&P 500 itself over time, you will find they follow almost the same trend, implying their comp package stays roughly the same each year but the value of their equity keeps growing. Where as the median worker pay has grown much less.
In other words, when comparing median CEO comp to worker comp and noticing a divergence, what you’re witnessing is more so stagnant worker wage growth. To fix the gap, workers need to be paid more, but their wages are being weighed down
But you are right. Changing CEO compensation to be based on short term stock gains SHURELY will result in them perusing long term health policies for companies like re-investing profits into the company and not pursue short term stock manipulation policies like ordering the use company funds to repurchase stock (in effect ordering company funds be used to increase the CEOs comp value).
Totally a healthy, sustainable way to run our economy.
"It matters where you direct your attention. Performance-based comp is a red herring. If you want to direct your rage at wealth inequality in the working class, perhaps start with the things that have eroded the supply-demand balance of labor, such as globalization and technology."
Who is using AI as an excuse to fire people? The same CEOs people are complaining about. And why are the CEOs doing it even though it's not proven tech? For short term stock gains, in order in enrich themselves via their stock compensation.
> For short term stock gains, in order in enrich themselves via their stock compensation.
https://www.equilar.com/reports/34-executive-stock-ownership...
I mean you're technically correct but then again it's like saying "the skin on your thigh is extremely distended and painful but that's because of the infected boil on it" as if the context is reasonable. Unfortunately it is not.
Disclosure: have financial positions based on collapse of US economy (see my Medium article for more)
Executives get compensated increasingly larger orders of magnitude more than the average workers at their companies. The exact form of this compensation doesn't really matter. Even if it's theoretically tied to performance, the same is arguably true of all workers, except their award mechanism is often whether the company continues to pay them or fires them. And either way the increasingly massive delta between CEO and worker pay is still notable. Are CEOs performing massively better in order to justify this massively increased performance based compensation compared to their average employee?
All of this causes money to run to the stock market, equity valuations to go crazy high, and also concentrate at the top. This is seen to be true today as the equal-weighted s&p lost to the cap-weighted s&p by the largest margin on record in 23-24, more than 10%. During relatively healthier times, it usually outperforms by 1%ish. Check the expanding gulf between returns of the S&P top 10 and S&P next 490.
Execs get paid in equity more than employees, and so their TC accelerates faster.
Gambling (whitewashed terms: speculation/trading) is always the original sin :) Has been since the bronze age. Most of what most participants in the stock market do today is just meaningless zero-value drivel. Due to the tragedy-of-the-commons effect, it is almost impossible to do disciplined, "charlie munger"-style investing in the market today.
Historically, these conditions have always mean-reverted. But it has never been pretty :)
Employee – CEO pay gap historically wide
Total pay for the broader American workforce increased 3.6 per cent in the 12 months that ended December 2024, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
You’re moving the goalposts.
You asked “how many points below inflation” recent wage growth has been. The premise is flawed. Wages have risen faster than inflation, massively over the last 50 years.
You mean 2 years? Here's a handy chart of average wage vs inflation in US https://www.epi.org/blog/average-wages-have-surpassed-inflat...
It's kind of hovering above 0, too. Since this is just average wages, if you exclude CEOs who are earning 400x more than workers maybe it will not even be above inflation now
To that point, the premise is sound. We should expect real wages to increase faster than inflation because labor productivity has also increased faster than inflation. But productivity and wages have been decoupled for the last 50 years, meaning those productivity gains are disproportionately allocated. In other words, productivity gains haven’t led to a proportional increase in wage-earner standard of living.
"CEO pay has skyrocketed 1,460% since 1978" - https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-in-2021/
This is about actual CEOs, not mid-level executives who are CEOs of departments.
But it’s not. The folks getting shot are mid-level executives.
I would be surprised because it didn’t happen [1].
[1] https://www.blackstone.com/people/stephen-a-schwarzman-2/
"LePatner, who served as CEO of the Blackstone Real Estate Income Trust (BREIT), was killed in a shooting Monday at the company’s headquarters, Blackstone said in a statement."
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/tylerroush/2025/07/29/blackston...
Right. Same as the Luigi guy. She was "CEO" of a department. Not the CEO of Blackstone. Relative to the actually rich she's upper middle class.
That’s not a CEO. It’s a performative title. The point is the people this article concerns itself with, CEOs of top companies, actual CEOs, they’re not the ones getting shot. Their direct reports, or in the case of Blackstone, I believe, their reports’ reports, are the ones taking the bullets.
I think just about literally anyone can go up to someone on the street, shoot them while they're defenseless and then get caught within 5 days.
Also, I can help you on your moral waffling: what he did was fundamentally wrong.
Public figures don't have personal security because it's _hard_ to find them. They have personal security because it's _easy_ to find them.
It depends on how you read the situation, if it's a slow brewing revolution it'll be deemed morally right after the facts
Do you export all of your moral reasoning to whatever the popular opinion is?
Flight tracking data is public.
What's shocking isn't that the Luigi case happened; what's shocking is that it doesn't happen more frequently.
Even in popular tech-- the internet-- we're seeing a wave of regulation and surveillance that will certainly stifle future growth for the small guy. You still see a lot of positive sentiment with regard to the "old internet".
I’ve always associated HN with a more humane side of the tech industry, relatively more concerned about the wellbeing of society at large.
Big tech is long past having a positive impact, and well into crony capitalism/oligopolies/regulatory capture/maximizing exploitation and rent seeking.
Where is this free market you're talking about ? Is it the ones with all the lobbies spending billions to get ahead ? Or the one where the government friends get the juicy contracts ?
What really surprises me is how much of HN swallows the whole capitalist propaganda without ever questioning it. Maybe the promise of the journey from the garage to billionaire is too enticing.
Did they? Usually executive pay is increasing faster than typical employee's pay, is the article saying that they're increasing equally?
If you have a company you want the best person to run it and if the best person costs a lot you might still want to hire them. Why do you think they are being paid that much? Its because the company gets back way more than they spent on the CEO wages.
Profits increasing for the company is a good thing - you can use it to further improve your company by hiring more people or hiring better people by paying them more. Profits increasing is also good for the country - more taxes collected.
Yes a CEO has an impact on the business but so does everyone else. Ultimately he's one more piece of the puzzle and absolutely nothing can justify this salary gap.
Anyone with any sliver of common sense knows they aren't worth 400x more than everyone else. Fire the CEO and the company continues. Fire all your workers and let's see what happens.
If anything the real reason they're paid so much is so the shareholders have an easy scapegoat to fire (with their golden parachutes) while pushing for short term profits as much as possible.
Take a look at this: https://www.theyrule.net/
These CEOs are sons, brother in laws, cousins, friends, etc. from the same group of people that populate the boards. The corruption at the top is absolutely blatant and that's where huge chunks of money generated from the folks that actually do the work ends up.
There are even studies on companies that self-organize without CEOs being more efficient than "regular" companies. The sad truth is that having a dictator at the top of every company is not as good as people make it out to be. You may get a good dictator, but it's way more likely you don't.
That's the whole problem, nobody would care if they could afford the same standard of living as their parents.
This is untrue - the consumption patterns (after accounting for inflation) of the bottom 20% in 2025 are way higher than in 1970s. Almost 60-70% higher. Almost everyone is better off today than before. https://www.cbo.gov/publication/59510 has some clues.
I encourage you to do your own research on it. Try to answer this question: are we as a society materially better off today than 50 years ago?
Surprisingly your image while it doesn't show the full picture, still shows that the living standards haven't reduced.
That's how you sound... they're unhappy because they can't afford a house or kids, because jobs are increasing precarious and unstable, &c. not because toilet paper and avocados are now 5% cheaper than in 1949
My (unskilled, uneducated) grandpa worked in the same place his whole life, afforded 4 kids and a flat on one income. I'm in the top 10% earners, so is my wife, I can't afford a flat that would be big enough for 2 kids.
Yes housing is proportionally higher but home ownership is pretty much constant https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N
Crucially the cost of everything else has come down dramatically to balance for rise in home prices.
> I'm in the top 10% earners, so is my wife, I can't afford a flat that would be big enough for 2 kids.
This is true but this is not because CEO wages are rising but despite it. IMO this is happening because people moved to the cities and enough houses were not built in time (you try to answer the question as to why). Your grandfather probably lived in a rural part of the country and could afford a big house where there was no demand - something you can still do now.
There is another reason housing prices have also gone up which is not talked about often - while prices of other things reduced people had more to spend on other things. They chose to put remaining on housing because.. well where else would you put it?
>home ownership is pretty much constant
I’m not convinced this metric is as good as you imply. It may just imply people are more buried in debt. If you look at the proportion of debt-to-GDP, household debt went from ~15.8% in the 1940s to peaking at 128% just before the financial crises, and settling to lower levels since then.
There’s a difference between “owning a home” and “living in the banks collateral”
Also look at percentage of people who have degrees from universities?
I agree things didn’t get uniformly better but it is clear that today is more preferable to live in than 50 years ago.
Switching the rubric to fit the argument is dishonest.
Shall we stick to real disposable income as the rubric?
The gap between wages and cost of living has continued to increase[1]. I'm unsure why you would want to change the rubric to something that doesn't support your claims.
What level of evidence would change your mind?
I hope you can understand how this complicates things because every subject has many sides to it.. of course its worth looking at all but I do put my threshold at slightly larger institutes.
It says, "I'm not in truth on the basis of fact, but because there weren't enough authors listed on the publication."
If I had time I could analyze if myself but I’m not here to nor have time to defending against any rando theory in the internet.
This is a parody, right?
Besides, if organization size did have a epistemic preference, then we run into obviously untrue and bizarre preferences.
Maybe yours line up with these:
Catholic Church (~1.3 billion baptized members)
Red Cross / Red Crescent Movement (~97 million volunteers and members)
Scouting Movement (~50+ million members worldwide)
U.S. Department of Defense (~3 million, including active-duty, reserves, and civilians)
People’s Liberation Army (China) (~2 million active personnel)
Walmart (~2.1 million employees worldwide)
Amazon (~1.5 million employees)
Foxconn (~1 million employees)
If they don't, you're just adding epicycles to a very flawed way at arriving at truth. Do you see this as a stable epistemic methodology you'd stand by elsewhere, or is it a situational tactic for this debate?
If the LISEP report had a mistake in it, how would you know about it? Did they have anyone from the outside review it?
The size of an institution is important because it gives us a proxy for its credibility to an extent. Yes I do believe that Amazon, US Department of Defense etc are more trust worthy in general than a random institute with 10 employees.
But in this case, I must admit I was wrong in using head count as a proxy because I realise smaller do institutions produce good white papers. But my main point is still valid: we are using a non peer reviewed methodology that has close to zero endorsements from anyone serious. We should stick to stats like ones from CBO/BLS which have more rigorous scientific standards.
CBO's report is much more rigorous
"CBO’s analytic reports are also reviewed by outside experts who specialize in the issue at hand, when that is practical. In some cases, those experts are members of CBO's Panel of Economic Advisers or Panel of Health Advisers. Although such experts provide considerable assistance, CBO is solely responsible for its work."
>If they don't, you're just adding epicycles to a very flawed way at arriving at truth. Do you see this as a stable epistemic methodology you'd stand by elsewhere, or is it a situational tactic for this debate?
At a more personal level - please stop using cringe language. No one is going to be impressed with it. If you do want to convince someone and engage in conversation, speak their language.
To your main point of "Veracity is a function to closeness to truth". Lets say hypothetically a redditor (since you have disdain for them apparently) comes up with a critique of this paper. Without doing your own analysis how do you verify whom to believe? You had already implicitly dismissed them - a dismissal which I think is fair, but why did you do it? Because it is just a random person somewhere with no credibility. Much in the same way LEPIS lies in the spectrum between credible and not so credible.
Not that it was totally accurate before, but the ability to use USD value alone as a measure of your Y/Y wage changes really went off the rails about 50 years ago.
It's not the only factor, of course.
Why? You’d just pay more cash. Or incentive bonds or whatnot.
Just add a marginal tax tier at $10mm or whatever.
Pay more to cover the taxes. Or, as I suggested, pay in assets that aren't equity. Bonds, for instance. Or, like, buy the executive's side business once a year.
Regulating compensation is a silly way to get around raising taxes on the rich.
better incentivize companies to give CEOs more money if their employees get more money and also disincentivize short term stock price manipulation.
CEO's and companies _create_ wealth. It can be true that by taxing and redistributing you can increase living standards of poor people but it is not at all the case that they are the primary reason other people don't have money.
There are two forces that are somewhat equally important: creating wealth that never existed before and distributing it if necessary to maintain some equitability. The redistribution part is only possible because the wealth was created to be redistributed later.
Creating wealth (which is done by companies and CEO's are a big part of it) is strictly a positive increase - creating wealth doesn't mean you take it from others which is a very common misconception I keep noticing in many places. CEO's paid a lot of money is not money that is taken away from others - it is new money that didn't exist.
Now to be fair this article doesn't say it out loud but I think the vibes are there and many people do believe this.
If you actually read the article, you'll find:
Total pay for the broader American workforce increased 3.6 per cent in the 12 months that ended December 2024, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
And the highest paid S&P 500 CEO? A guy who runs a Taser company who's SAAS software segment has taken off:
The highest paid S&P 500 CEO last year was Rick Smith of Taser maker Axon Enterprise, who raked in $164.5mn
And why was he paid so much?
mostly from stock awards after meeting targets over several years, according to data provided by MyLogIQ.
So he was smart with this stock options and oh yeah, just happened to hit the company's revenue targets several years in a row. I'm supposed to be angry because the CEO actually did his job, hit his goals and returned a great profit to the shareholders?
Axon's stock a year ago was at $354/share. This year at the same time? Its now $760/share. Over a five year period, the stock went from $83/share to where it is now at $760.
If you actually form a cogent opinion of your own rather than shilling for monied interests you'll find:
All equity given to any ceo could, and should, instead be divided amongst the entire org's staff.
This is a somewhat incomplete picture. PE ratio was also inflated by 50% in the last year. So the increase in stock price isn’t tracking real earnings.
The larger point is that there may be a misalignment between what is good for a company/CEO and what is good for broader society. To that point, your example is a company that has effectively dodged duty/responsibility when their product kills somebody and pushed that responsibility onto peace officers.