Just a year after vanishing from nine-figure pay packages, a $100 million-plus CEO is back with a bang.
More U.S. CEOs exceeded the once-rare pay threshold last year than in any year since 2021 — and nearly a dozen topped $200 million.
their compensation appeared in pieces, Of course, that’s compared to Tesla’s Elon Musk’s $158 billion pay package, which set a new record and is about 16 times the combined value for all 391 other chiefs in the Wall Street Journal’s annual CEO pay ranking. (Musk’s deal could ultimately be worth $1 trillion.)
Still, No. 2 Shankha Mitra pulled in $821 million from Welltower, a real-estate investment trust focused on senior housing and health care. It’s one of the largest executive-pay packages for a public company CEO in the past decade, data from MyLogIQ shows.
Find out how CEOs compare on pay, performance, and more in the interactive table at the end of this article.
The last time Musk’s compensation set a record, in 2018, it led to a surge in so-called moonshot pay packages: massive stock or option awards tied to ambitious, multiyear goals. (Evidence suggests that they often do not pay executives or investors.)
Then it took several years to gain momentum. Now, companies are hoping to change.
More than half of the CEOs who made more than $100 million last year ran companies outside the S&P 500, meaning they are not included in the Journal’s rankings. These include Dylan Field of design-software company Figma, worth $864 million, and Kaz Nejatian of online real-estate transaction platform Opendoor Technologies, worth $741 million.
The moonshot wasn’t the only factor driving up salaries. Overall, average CEO pay at S&P 500 companies is set to rise to nearly $18 million in 2025 — a new high — the Journal found in its analysis of data from MyLogIQ. More executives earned more than $50 million, and share earnings of less than $10 million fell further.
Half of the chiefs received year-over-year increases of 9.8% or more.
Most large companies pay their CEOs primarily in stock options or restricted stock, often with some conditions: They get fewer shares if the company performs poorly over time – or more if it is successful. As a result, the profits executives ultimately realize may differ significantly from the companies’ first reported value. (Often, they end up with more.)
At Welltower, 99% of Mitra’s pay came from stock grants, including $789 million given in October. Securities filings show that by year’s end, the company said the value of shares under award was just over $1 billion.
Mitra will receive about half the shares in 2031 as long as he stays on, and the remainder if Welltower’s market value rises 45% and the company’s shares beat several stock indexes by a substantial margin over five years.
According to MyLogIQ, three other Welltower executives also received packages worth more than $100 million, making it only the second company in a decade to have four nine-figure executives in the same year. Welltower said the awards replace bonuses and equity for a decade and are designed to align their incentives with shareholders.
How much the CEO is paid often has little to do with shareholder returns.
Robinhood Markets, the trading platform, recorded the best shareholder return in the Journal’s ranking, at 204%. The company valued CEO Vladimir Tenev’s compensation for the year at $3 million.
But securities filings show that Tenev was able to cash out a pay package from 2019, valuing the CEO’s stock at $1.1 billion. (Tenev and the company agreed to eliminate the 2021 pay package, which was originally worth $796 million.) Robinhood said the full 2019 award was awarded only after the company’s shares more than doubled their 2021 IPO price.
Two of the highest-paid CEOs ran top-performing companies: Warner Bros. Discovery ranked fourth based on performance and paid $165 million for David Zaslav. Broadcom, which ranked seventh in performance, said total compensation for Hock Tan reached $205 million.
Both men have previously earned nine-figure pay packages — $247 million for Zaslav in 2021 and $162 million for Tan in 2023. Broadcom said Tan will not receive more equity until 2030 and can only earn rewards by meeting revenue targets from artificial intelligence.