The 15 ‘Most Fairly’ Paid CEOs
By: Fast Company
September 13, 2023
As more states require companies to share information on salary transparency, the question of pay equity between executives and workers is being taken up by unions, shareholder activists, and researchers who question why CEO pay has ballooned in recent years.
But the latest batch of executive compensation disclosures filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission also reveal some CEOs who (at first glance, at least) have more reasonable pay packages. Urban Outfitters CEO Richard Hayne, for example, takes a token $1 per year, but earns bonuses and other compensation. Still, his pay is fairly equitable compared with his peers on the Russell 3000 Index. Box’s Aaron Levie is also among the reasonably paid by this metric, and the average salary of a worker at his cloud-based content management company earns a nice salary as well. And then there’s Elon Musk who, in his role as CEO of Tesla, appears to be paid like a man of the people.
…On that note, in the rankings—compiled by SEC compliance and disclosure intelligence company MyLogIQ—we have chosen to leave out CEOs who paid themselves zero or far below the median employee; though these gestures can be impressive, they can make it difficult to fully understand the scope of CEO pay. (You can, however, find a list of CEOs with avant garde pay at the bottom of this post.)
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