America’s best paid CEO (and the rest) – The Wall Street Journal

DUBLIN — America's CEOs are the best paid people on earth. The combination of generous pay packages plus healthy dollops of stock options and a bull market have sent CEO pay up into the stratosphere. But the relationship between CEO pay and shareholder returns isn't always what you may expect. You'd think that the best paid CEOs would be the ones who do the best job for shareholders, but you'd be wrong. The WSJ breaks down this year's CEO winners and losers, although it only looks at salary and doesn't consider share-based remuneration. Take a look at the article below to learn a little about how the other half lives. – Felicity Duncan.The WSJ CEO Pay Ranking: An analysis of 2018 compensation for S&P 500 leaders.By Theo Francis and Lakshmi Ketineni.(The Wall Street Journal) Median pay reached $12.4m for CEOs of the biggest US companies in 2018, setting a fourth straight post-recession high even as stock-market returns tumbled at most of the companies. Most S&P 500 CEOs got raises of 5% or better during the year, while total shareholder return was -5.8%, according to a WSJ analysis of data from MyLogIQ. Scroll to explore the highest-paid CEOs, and the lowest, with comparisons of shareholder returns and other factors..___STEADY_PAYWALL___.Highest paid.Many of the top earners of 2018 ran health-care, media and financial companies, with those sectors filling 18 of the top 25 by total pay (excluding those who came or went during the year). Unlike previous years, technology CEOs took just three of the top 25 spots..Lowest paid.Just 23 CEOs in the S&P 500 made less than $5m last year, down from 26 a year earlier. Four made less than $1m – with two tech founders, Larry Page and Jack Dorsey, taking token salaries of just $1 apiece..Women.The number of women running S&P 500 companies continued to decline, with just 20 on the job all year, down from 22 the prior year. Long-serving leaders like PepsiCo's Indra Nooyi and Hewlett Packard Enterprise's Meg Whitman retired. Median pay for the remaining women, at $13.7m, was higher than for men..Best return.Returns at the best-performing companies ranged from 50% to 82%, well below their counterparts a year earlier, when the top five boasted triple-digit returns. Ten of the top 25 spots were taken by technology companies in 2018..Lowest return.Some of the worst-performing companies changed CEOs during the year, including General Electric and drug-maker Perrigo. Among the 30 companies without a CEO change posting shareholder returns of -35% or worse, half were run by CEOs on the job for at least 8 years..Biggest pay gain.The biggest swings in CEO pay were caused by large equity grants that weren't awarded the previous year. The $16m in restricted stock that Kinder Morgan paid Steven Kean was the first he received since becoming CEO in mid-2015. Salesforce co-founder and co-CEO Marc Benioff received no stock or options the previous year..Biggest pay drop.Similarly, some of the CEOs with the biggest declines in 2018 pay had received special stock awards the year before that made them among the highest-paid for 2017, including TripAdvisor's Stephen Kaufer and Broadcom's Hock Tan.

America’s best paid CEO (and the rest) – The Wall Street Journal

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