Reddit co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman has been blasted by Redditors and in media reports over his recently-revealed, super-sized pay package of $193 million in 2023.
The staggering figure was included in the company’s U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing on Feb. 22 as it prepares to launch an initial public offering this week. Huffman defended his compensation in a video on his social media platform this week. Quartz calculates that it’s more than the pay packages for the CEOs of Pinterest, Snap, and Meta — combined.
While Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Snap’s Evan Spiegel make base salaries of just $1 — as of their most recently SEC filings that include such information — Pinterest’s Bill Ready earns a salary of $400,000, and Huffman’s is about $340,000, and was raised to $550,000 in February. Although Zuckerberg’s total compensation is seven times less than that of Huffman, the tech tycoon has a major stake in Meta stock and can make hundreds of millions of dollars from dividends. Meta also pays for Zuckerberg’s security and private jet flights.
Although Spiegel makes the least of social media CEOs now, he made the most of any CEO in 2017 — even multi-CEO Elon Musk of Tesla, SpaceX, and others. He was criticized at the time for his $638 million pay package, which was listed in an SEC filing by Snap as it prepared to launch its own IPO. Snap indicated at the time that Spiegel would be paid a base salary of $1 going forward, which he has been.
Left off the list is X CEO Linda Yaccarino, since the Musk-owned company (formerly Twitter) is no longer public.
Huffman comes well ahead in CEO compensation now — and he could make even more money selling shares during Reddit’s initial public offering on Thursday. Huffman owns about 3.2% of the company’s shares. Current Reddit investors plan to sell 7 million shares at a value of between $31 and $34.