CEO Compensation Landscape
The CEO of the company that generated $165 million in earnings from Stun Guns last year has raised concerns about the hefty payments awarded to leading executives of S&P 500 companies like Apple, Meta, and Nvidia.
Rick Smith, co-founder of Axon Enterprises, stood out by receiving a staggering $100 million salary package, thanks to the widespread use of its tasers and body cameras by law enforcement agencies nationwide. This data comes from the Wall Street Journal’s annual analysis.
Following Smith are Larry Culp of General Electric at $89 million, Steve Schwarzman of Blackstone at $84 million, and Apple’s Tim Cook at $75 million.
Smith mentioned that his public company is introducing a new program allowing Axon employees to convert some portion of their salaries into restricted stock for durations exceeding seven years.
“I think one thing I appreciate about this design is you can really create zeroes. When you manage to create zeros, it gives you a sense of satisfaction in producing a lot of things,” Smith expressed. “For me, it definitely brings a startup atmosphere.”
The Journal indicated that Smith’s payment for 2024 marked a significant rise from the $40,000 he earned the year before.
Remarkably, Axon’s shares have soared over 170% in the past year, closing at $758 on Monday.
According to MyLogiQ’s data, roughly half of the analytics executives earned more than $17.1 million last year.
Co-CEOs of Netflix, Theodore Sarandos and Greg Peters, occupied the eighth and tenth places, with earnings of $62 million and $60 million, respectively.
Other noteworthy figures include Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce at $55 million, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang at $50 million, Uber’s Dara Khosrowshahi at $39 million, JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon at $38 million, and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg at $27 million. Curiously, the world’s richest person did not earn anything last year, with his salary package entangled in legal disputes.
The Journal utilized MyLogiQ data to analyze CEOs with at least one year of experience in more than 400 S&P 500 companies.
Typically, a significant portion of the high salaries for S&P 500 CEOs, including Smith’s, derived from stock awards rather than base salary.
Smith, who has been at the helm of Axon since 1993, previously received a $246 million award in 2019.
According to Forbes, his net worth currently stands at about $2.4 billion.
Executives outside the S&P 500 have garnered impressive salaries as well, with Shopify’s Tobias Lutke earning $150 million, while Peter Gassner of Veeva Systems exceeded this threshold at $172 million.
However, the previous year represented the lowest count of CEOs making nine-digit salaries since 2016, as reported by the Journal.
