Former Vice President Joe Biden (D., Del.) is running for President again. And one of Donald Trump’s 2016 rivals thinks that Mr. Biden is the most formidable of the potential 2020 rivals.
The website Mediaite notes that former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who ran against Mr. Trump in the last round of Republican primaries, sees a potential GOP problem in the Midwest:
Walmart CEO Doug McMillon’s total compensation reached nearly $24 million during the last year as the company continued to hold its ground against Amazon and other rival retailers.
Chief executives have long earned some of the largest paychecks in America, but at what point does their compensation defy reason? If you’re Abigail Disney, the granddaughter of the Disney company’s co-founder Roy Disney, the tipping point is about $66 million — or what Disney CEO Bob Iger earned last year.
In a series of tweets posted on April 21, Abigail Disney criticized the level of compensation Iger receives, stating that “by any objective measure a pay ratio over a thousand is insane.”
The $65.7 million Iger earned last year is indeed more than 1,000 times the median salary of all Disney employees, which is $46,127, according to a study from Equilar. Thanks to incentives associated with his contract extension, that imbalance amounted to a paycheck 1,424 times greater than his workers’ in 2018. (This year, his compensation is projected to be a more modest $35 million.)
Income inequality is a growing problem in the United States. In cities across the country, the rich are getting richer while the poor are getting poorer. Perhaps nowhere is the problem more apparent than in the corporate world. In some of the largest and most recognizable global companies, chief executives earn in less than an hour… Continue reading These CEOs Make 1,000 Times More Than Their Employees
Income inequality is a growing problem in the United States. In cities across the country, the rich are getting richer while the poor are getting poorer. Perhaps nowhere is the problem more apparent than in the corporate world. In some of the largest and most recognizable global companies, chief executives earn in less than an hour as much as their typical employee earns in an entire year.
MyLogIQ, a data aggregator of public companies, recently released a report comparing total CEO compensation to median employee compensation for companies on the S&P 500 index. 24/7 Wall St. reviewed the report to identify the 13 companies where the CEO makes at least 1,000 times the salary of their typical employee.
These immense differences in compensation between CEOs and their typical employees in some cases are the product of extremely high CEO compensation – over $100 million in one case. More often, however, it is a combination of large CEO pay (the lowest is $8.8 million) and very low median employee annual pay, as many of these companies employ part-time or seasonal workers. Indeed, some of these companies rank among those that owe their employees a raise.
As U.S. companies disclose what they pay typical workers, one thing is clear: A lot can change in a year.
Jefferies Financial Group Inc. almost tripled what it paid its median employee last year. Median pay rose by nearly 60% at Macy’s Inc. and by almost a quarter at biotech Celgene Corp. It fell by two-thirds at Coca-Cola Co. and by more than a quarter at snack-maker Mondelez International Inc.
The reasons for these big swings from 2017 to 2018 varied widely, however. Some reflected dramatic shifts in the company’s workforce. Others came about thanks to new ways of identifying that middle employee. Still others reflect actual changes in what individual workers made.
Discovery Inc. DISCB -1.47% Chief Executive David Zaslav received total compensation valued at $129.4 million in 2018, more than three times his compensation the year before, the company said in a securities filing Friday.
The compensation package makes Mr. Zaslav the highest paid U.S. executive of 2018, according to filings so far. His salary in 2018 remained flat at $3 million. The raise is largely the result of a substantial increase in stock-option awards tied to the contract extension Mr. Zaslav signed last year.
That employment agreement runs through 2023. The burst of options grants was accounted for in 2018; his annual compensation for the remainder of his deal will return to levels more consistent with earlier years, a company spokesman said.
The strong U.S. economy has created millions of jobs and pushed up wages for many Americans. It also helped many big-company CEOs secure another raise and total compensation worth $1 million a month.
Median compensation for 132 chief executives of S&P 500 companies reached $12.4 million in 2018, up from $11.7 million for the same group in 2017, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis. The gains were driven by robust corporate profits and strong stock market returns for much of the year.
Most of these CEOs received substantial raises—the median was 6.4%—even though the December stock-market swoon meant most of the companies finished out the year posting sluggish shareholder returns.
