The chief executives of some of the top publicly traded companies in the U.S. are seeing their pay soar.
Semiconductor company Broadcom’s chief executive Hock Tan received a $161 million stock award that could reach over a billion dollars based on the company’s surging share price, with underlying shares valued at about $1.3 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal. Broadcom did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Meanwhile, Cisco Systems CEO Charles Robbins saw his paycheck for the fiscal year 2023 ending in July more than double to $65.5 million, and Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen also saw his 2023 paycheck almost double to $87.2 million, the Journal reported, noting that the restricted stock awards and stock options for Tan, Robbins, and Narayen rose faster than their companies’ share prices and annual returns for their shareholders.
Pay growth for most chief executives of 187 S&P 500 companies rebounded in 2023, with median pay reaching $15.6 million compared to $14.1 million in 2022, the Journal found, using pay data from MyLogIQ. The Journal calculated salary, bonus, equity, equity gains, gains on prior equity, and other types of compensation in their calculations.
Meanwhile, a Quartz calculation found Reddit co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman received a larger pay package than the chief executives of Pinterest, Snapchat, and Meta combined in 2023. Reddit, which went public last week, paid its chief executive $193 million last year, according to the company’s U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing on Feb. 22.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel both have a base salary of $1, but received a compensation of $27.1 million and $3.3 million, respectively. Zuckerberg also has a major stake in Meta that could see him receive hundreds of millions of dollars in dividends. Pinterest CEO Bill Ready receives a $400,000 salary, but received a total compensation of $122.7 million, according to recent SEC data.