Tag: Compensation

These Are the Highest-Paid Corporate Board Members in the U.S.

At a number of major American companies, compensation for board of director members has come under fire from shareholders in recent years. While director salaries remain a small fraction of CEO salaries (these are the highest paid CEOs at America’s largest companies), they have steadily risen over the past decade. In several recent instances, shareholders have even pursued litigation against – what they consider to be – excessive board compensation.

According to data from public company intelligence provider MyLogIQ, the average compensation of nonexecutive board chairpersons at Russell 3000 companies was $330,782 in fiscal 2018. At 18 public companies, the nonexecutive chair of the board made over $1 million.

At a public company, the board of directors is a supervisory body appointed by shareholders to act on their behalf and oversee the activities of management. The chairperson is chosen by the board and is typically responsible for setting the agenda and presiding over meetings. While some companies have combined CEO-chair roles, the majority of large corporations separate the two positions, maintaining certain checks and balances between the branches of corporate governance.

Board Members Who Make More Than $1 Million

At a number of major American companies, compensation for board of director members has come under fire from shareholders in recent years. While director salaries remain a small fraction of CEO salaries (these are the highest paid CEOs at America’s largest companies), they have steadily risen over the past decade. In several recent instances, shareholders have even pursued litigation against — what they consider to be — excessive board compensation.

According to data from public company intelligence provider MyLogIQ, the average compensation of nonexecutive board chairpersons at Russell 3000 companies was $330,782 in fiscal 2018. At 18 public companies, the nonexecutive chair of the board made over $1 million.

At a public company, the board of directors is a supervisory body appointed by shareholders to act on their behalf and oversee the activities of management. The chairperson is chosen by the board and is typically responsible for setting the agenda and presiding over meetings. While some companies have combined CEO-chair roles, the majority of large corporations separate the two positions, maintaining certain checks and balances between the branches of corporate governance.

McDonald’s CEO Makes an Hour What the Average Worker Makes a Year

McDonald’s Corp. has been among the American companies that pay its workers the least. As some evidence of the ongoing pay problem at the fast-food chain, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has released the compensation of McDonald’s CEO Stephen Easterbrook. He was paid $15.9 million in 2018. That is 2,124 times the median employee salary of $7,473. It means that Easterbrook, who has been CEO since 2015, earns in an hour what it takes a median employee to make in a year, according to data from public company intelligence firm MyLogIQ.

Easterbrook’s pay ratio is the sixth highest among chief executives included in MyLogIQ’s data. In our earlier report on the 100 highest-paid CEOs, Easterbrook was No. 57. It is not the first year he has been paid well. He made $21.8 million in 2017.

McDonald’s has approximately 210,000 workers worldwide, and over 36,000 locations. In its recent proxy statement, the company said that its median employee in 2018 was a part-time restaurant crew employee located in Hungary. The company had revenue of $21 billion last year, down 7% from 2017. Net income was $5.9 billion, up 11%.

Will Upswing in One-Time Stock Awards Crumble?

One-time stock awards for CEOs in fiscal year 2018 are up, compared to the previous two years.

According to data from analytics firm MyLogIQ, in 2018, the largest one-time stock awards in the S&P 500 went to Oracle’s co-CEOs Safra Catz and Mark Hurd, each of whom received special awards of nearly $104 million — almost seven times the next-largest special award of $15.5 million.

Compensation experts aren’t sure these blockbuster special awards are part of a trend with a lot of legs, though. Judging by the voter support levels, many shareholders were irked by the amounts for the one-time stock awards. Several of the companies that awarded large amounts received low shareholder support for say-on pay.

Wall Street Chiefs’ Pay Doesn’t Sync With Returns

Wall Street companies delivered significant losses to their shareholders last year, but the pain didn’t spread to the top.

The chiefs of banking and financial institutions in the S&P 500 received a median raise of 8.5% last year, compared with 5.6% for CEOs in the broader index, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis.

Meanwhile, firms in the sector posted a median total shareholder return—or stock-price changes plus dividends—of negative 17% in 2018, while the median return for the index as a whole was negative 5.8%.

Median pay for finance CEOs was $11.4 million for the year, $1 million below the overall S&P 500 median. The Journal analysis uses total compensation as specified by Securities and Exchange Commission regulations, which includes salary, annual bonuses, and long-term equity and cash incentives. It also includes perquisites and the value of pension gains and some increases in deferred compensation accounts.

This Executive Made $108 Million and Is Not a CEO

CEO pay has become a bone of contention between the boards of some public companies and their shareholders. How can a CEO be worth tens of millions of dollars, some investors ask, no matter how good earnings are? Boards argue that the best CEOs are in short supply, and need to be paid sums that will keep them in place, and motivated. Several companies pay executives who are not CEOs extravagant compensation. In these cases,  questions about pay become even more in question.

Some of the non-CEOs who make massive sums are founders or the relatives of founders. For several people at the top of non-CEO large pay packages, this is the case. The top paid non-CEO executive at a public company last year was Larry Ellison, who made $108 million for 2018, according to new data from MyLogIQ, which analyses public company information. Ellison is the executive chairman and chief technology officer of Oracle Corporation, which he founded in 1977. He stepped down as CEO in 2014. He is currently the seventh wealthiest person in the U.S., with a net worth of $71 billion, according to Forbes. Ellison never graduated from college but has built a company with revenue of $40 billion last year. He is also among the world’s premier yachtsmen. A team he financed won the America’s Cup in 2013.

Listed: Biggest NEO-CEO Pay Flips

The typical S&P 500 company pays its chief executive officer more — typically 2.7 times more — than its next four named executive officers, or NEOs. But not always.

Agenda commissioned research firm MyLogIQ, which crunches data from SEC filings, to analyze the largest S&P 500 companies at which an NEO received more compensation than the CEO last year. That provided several management insights.

To be sure, key NEO personnel such as technology experts and product designers are among those who can make more than CEOs. A separate analysis of the highest-paid NEOs found that eight of the 10 highest-paid made as much or almost as much as their CEOs.

Media CEOs Reigned in 2018 Pay

Media titans came under heavy scrutiny in 2018 for their business practices and deal making, but they were well-compensated for their trouble.

The S&P 500’s communication-services sector, a group that includes Facebook Inc., Walt Disney Co. and AT&T Inc., posted a median CEO pay of $22.6 million in 2018, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis, higher than any other sector and more than $10 million above the median pay of S&P chief executives as a group.

The sector included two of the five highest-paid CEOs in the Journal’s analysis of the index. David Zaslav of Discovery Inc., one of the sector’s smallest companies, had a $129.4 million pay package, more than any other CEO, as the owner of television networks such as Discovery Channel, HGTV and Food Network posted a total shareholder return of 10.6% for the year. A spokesman for Discovery said Mr. Zaslav’s compensation is mostly made up of performance-based equity over the next five years and is 97% at risk