Musk Effect Drives Spread of Supersize CEO Pay Packages

Elon Musk didn’t just upend the global auto business and space missions. The billionaire is also reshaping the landscape of executive pay.

Musk’s multibillion-dollar pay package from 2018 has set the tone for other high-end pay deals, despite being thrown out by a Delaware court earlier this year. More executives have gotten outsize pay packages, and those packages have been bigger, in the years since Musk’s came to light.

…Other supersize pay packages haven’t been as big, but more CEOs are getting them. In the past five years, three dozen CEOs of S&P 500 companies have received pay packages valued at $50 million or more, up from nine in the five years before Musk’s, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of data from MyLogIQ, a provider of public-company data and analysis.

The total cost of those pay packages has also grown rapidly, quadrupling in the past five years from the earlier period, the Journal found.

The Journal’s analysis included CEOs on the job for at least a year at more than 400 S&P 500 companies reporting pay through mid-May for fiscal years ending after June 30, 2023. A separate analysis by MyLogIQ also showed a rise in such pay packages.