Meet the Highest Paid CEOs: Who’s Earning the Most?

A look at the leaders raking in record salaries

The year 2023 was another good one for CEOs and their pay packages, though less so for their workers, according to the latest results from a long-running study by Equilar and The New York Times.

Key Takeaways

• CEO compensation was up a median of 20.1% in 2023, according to a major annual study.
• That brings CEOs’ median total compensation to $29.1 million.
• The best-paid CEOs made considerably more, with one receiving nearly $200 million in compensation.
• The ratio of median CEO pay to median worker pay is now 312 to 1.

What CEOs Made in 2023

The median total compensation for CEOs in the study rose by 20.1% to $29.1 million in 2023. Meanwhile, the median employee earned $101,947 in 2023, resulting in a CEO-to-average-worker pay ratio of 312 to 1.

As dramatic as those figures might sound, 11 CEOs earned at least twice the $29.1 million median in 2023, and one took home more than $198 million, nearly seven times the CEO median.

According to Equilar, an increase in the stock awards granted to CEOs—up a median 38.7% in 2023, to $21 million—”was largely responsible for total disclosed compensation rising at such a high rate.” Stock awards, it points out, “tend to make up the largest portion of an executive’s compensation package.”

The study was limited to U.S. public companies with revenues of at least $1 billion that had filed a proxy statement by April 30, 2024, Equilar says, so it’s possible that some CEOs made even more.

Listed below are the five highest paid CEOs in 2023, according to the study.

The 5 Highest Paid CEOs of 2023

1. Jon Winkelried, TPG Inc. (TPG)

• Total compensation in 2023: $198,685,926

Founded in 1992, TPG characterizes itself as “a leading global alternative asset manager with $224 billion in assets under management.”

Winkelried joined the firm as co-CEO in 2015 and became its sole CEO in 2021. Prior to TPG, he spent more than 27 years at Goldman Sachs, ultimately serving as president and co-chief operating officer and member of the board of directors from 2006 to 2009.

Reacting to Winkelried’s pay package in June 2024, New York Times columnist Jeff Sommer observed that, “The median pay of TPG employees was high, too: $290,997. Even so, it would take them 683 years to earn what Mr. Winkelried made in one year.”

2. Harvey M. Schwartz, The Carlyle Group Inc. (CG)

• Total compensation in 2023: $186,994,098

Not far behind Winkelried was Harvey M. Schwartz, CEO of the Carlyle Group Inc., another major player in the financial sector.

Founded in 1987, Carlyle calls itself “one of the world’s largest and most diversified global investment firms, with $425 billion of assets under management across 3 business segments and 595 investment vehicles.”

Like Winkelried, Schwartz is a Goldman Sachs alumnus, working there from 1997 to 2018 and rising to the title of president and co-chief operating officer, also like Winkelried. He became Carlyle’s CEO and a member of ts board of directors in February 2023.

3. Hock E. Tan, Broadcom Inc. (AVGO)

• Total compensation in 2023: $161,826,161

While in the No. 3 position on this list, Hock E. Tan holds the No. 1 spot as the highest paid Fortune 500 CEO in another recent Equilar study, this one done with the Associated Press. (Neither TPG nor Carlyle was in the Fortune 500 at the time of the study.) In fact, Tan’s $161 million in total compensation for 2023 was nearly $100 million greater than the second-place Fortune 500 finisher, William J. Lansing of Fair Isaac Corporation, whose compensation totaled just over $66 million.

Broadcom, which traces its roots to a 1960s division of Hewlett-Packard, today refers to itself as “a global technology leader that designs, develops and supplies a broad range of semiconductor, enterprise software and security solutions,” adding that its “category-leading product portfolio serves critical markets including cloud, data center, networking, broadband, wireless, storage, industrial and enterprise software.”

Tan has held the titles of president, CEO, and director since March 2006. In February 2024 he also joined the board of Facebook parent Meta. Meta’s own CEO, Mark Elliott Zuckerberg, came in 94th in the Equilar/New York Times study, with total compensation of $24,399,968.

4. Nikesh Arora, Palo Alto Networks, Inc. (PANW)

• Total compensation in 2023: $151,425,203

Palo Alto Networks characterizes itself as “the world’s cybersecurity leader,” providing “next-gen
cybersecurity to thousands of customers globally, across all sectors. Our best-in-class cybersecurity platforms and services are backed by industry-leading threat intelligence and strengthened by state-of-the-art automation.”

Arora joined the company in 2018 as chairman and CEO after serving as president and chief operating officer of SoftBank Group Corp. Earlier he spent a decade at Google, where he held various executive roles.

In January 2024, the Robb Report noted that, based on Bloomberg data, Arora had become one of the “rare non-founder tech CEO billionaires,” with an estimated net worth of $1.5 billion.

5. Sue Y. Nabi, Coty Inc. (COTY)

• Total compensation in 2023: $149,429,486

Nabi is the only woman in the top 5—or the top 38, for that matter. (Julie Spellman Sweet of Accenture ranked 39th, with total compensation of $31,550,906.) As Fortune magazine noted in 2023, Nabi was also “the only trans CEO in the Fortune 1000.”

Coty was founded in France in 1904 and, after multiple ownership changes, mergers, and acquisitions over the decades, went public in 2013 with a listing on the New York Stock Exchange. Today it describes itself as consisting of “a portfolio of best-in-class prestige and consumer beauty brands built around our core categories of fragrance, cosmetics, and skincare.”

Nabi joined Coty as CEO in 2020, after spending 20 years at L’Oreal and launching her own skincare line, Orveda.

You can see the rest of the study results here.

What Is Total Compensation?

Total compensation for purposes of the Equilar/New York Times study included “salary, cash bonuses, stock and options awards valued at grant date, and other compensation (including benefits and perks).”

What Is the CEO Pay Gap?

The CEO pay gap refers to the difference between a CEO’s compensation and the median compensation of their employees. Since 2018 public companies in the U.S. have been required to report that information, as a result of a provision in the federal Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act passed in 2010.

Specifically, Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) rules “require disclosure of the pay ratio in registration statements, proxy and information statements, and annual reports that call for executive compensation disclosure.” In practice, that means “the company’s annual proxy statement, its annual report on Form 10-K, and any registration statements filed by the company to register securities for sale to the public,” according to the SEC.

What Is the CEO-to-Top-0.1% Compensation Ratio?

The CEO-to-Top-0.1% compensation ratio is another way at looking at CEO pay packages relative to other workers, in this case those whose income puts them in the top 1/10 of 1% of earners.

According to a September 2023 report from the Economic Policy Institute, “Over the last three decades, compensation grew far faster for CEOs than it did for the top 0.1% of wage earners (those earning more than 99.9% of wage earners). CEO compensation in 2021 (the latest year for which data on top 0.1% wage earners are available) was 7.68 times as high as wages of the top 0.1% of wage earners.”

The Bottom Line

Being a CEO can be a high-pressure job with enormous responsibility, and many CEOs have relatively brief tenures. However, the job also has its rewards, including outsize compensation packages. While we were preparing this article, Tesla shareholders on June 13, 2024 approved a $56 billion pay package for CEO Elon Musk, suggesting that he might easily claim the No. 1 spot on next year’s list.

Read the original article on Investopedia.