We are only into the first full week of 2020, but the average chief executive officer of a company in the S&P 500 index has already made more money than the average worker will all year.
Securities and Exchange Commission data analyzed by the AFL-CIO union found that the average CEO of a company on the S&P 500 index made $14.5 million in 2018. Some quick math shows that comes out to $278,846 per week, and a measly $55,769 per day.
How does that compare to a typical worker in America? Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows the median weekly earnings of 118.4 million U.S. workers was $919 for the third quarter of 2019. That’s $47,788 per year.
And that $55,769 per day is just for the average CEO. Some of these top executives are raking in your yearly salary in a matter of minutes.
The highest-earning CEO in the S&P 500 for 2018 was Discovery, Inc.’s David Zaslav, who was compensated $129,499,005, most of that coming from stocks. He earned a $3 million base salary but tacked on another $116 million in stock and option awards, along with another $9 million in bonuses.
Dividing that almost $130 million across 52 weeks shows Zaslav made roughly $2.5 million a week. That means if he worked a typical 40-hour week, he made $62,259.13 per hour. Zaslav’s $130 million was 1,511 times a median employee’s pay.
Wealth inequality has been in the spotlight quite a bit the past year, especially by Democrats like Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, who are vying to face incumbent President Donald Trump in the 2020 election. Microsoft founder and CEO Bill Gates has even joined in saying that wealthy Americans don’t pay enough in taxes.
“Over the last several decades, CEO pay has grown much faster than profits, the pay of the top 0.1 percent of wage earners, and the wages of college graduates,” Economic Policy Institute’s Lawrence Mishel and Jessica Schieder wrote in their analysis of CEO pay in 2018. “CEOs are getting more because of their power to set pay, not because they are more productive or have special talents or more education.”
