U.S. CEOs are Bequeathing Us a Frightfully Unequal Future

Some 87 percent of Americans, polling tells us, consider today’s growing gap between U.S. CEO and worker pay a serious cause for national concern.

That gap has become a cause for global concern as well. CEO-worker pay gaps in the United States, as data in a new Altrata report make clear, are essentially cementing in place our world’s current “colossal” maldistribution of income and wealth.

In the decade ahead, the Altrata report forecasts, more than a quarter of the world’s wealthy worth at least $5 million will be passing on “almost $31 trillion” to their nearest and dearest. Some 64 percent of that $31 trillion will be coming from the world’s richest of the rich, those “ultra wealthy” deep pockets individually worth over $30 million.

Corporate executives, Altrata calculates, will make up over 71 percent of those global “ultra wealthy.” Another 21 percent of these ultras will be entrepreneurs who either founded or co-founded their own business empires. And nearly half of all these corporate execs and entrepreneurs, add Altrata’s researchers, will be deep-pocketed souls who call the United States home, “a testament” to America’s continuing status as the nation with by far the “world’s largest” population of ultra wealthy.

In other words, the world will see over the next ten years “the transfer of a staggering level of wealth,” and American top corporate execs will be sitting right in the center of that transfer. The billions these execs have amassed since the early 1980s — the years when CEO pay started soaring — will be vastly expanding the ranks of those who hold massive amounts of inherited wealth.

None of this, of course, should come as much of a surprise. CEO pay levels in the United States have now been making headlines for well over four decades. And this year those executive pay stats are showing what the New York Times has dubbed a “new wrinkle.”

Over the past half-dozen years, under the authority of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, the federal Securities and Exchange Commission has been requiring publicly traded corporations to annually disclose the ratio of their CEO pay to their median employee pay. The value of the stock rewards in that CEO pay has up until now reflected the share value of those stock rewards when the CEOs received them.

Share values can, of course, increase substantially over time. The original SEC pay-ratio regulations didn’t require corporations to figure those increased stock values into their CEO-worker pay ratios. The new SEC rules do require companies to “disclose how much CEO stock holdings increase when the market rises.”

The difference between the original and “new wrinkle” approaches can be substantial.

Under the original approach, America’s ten most highly paid CEOs last year collected between 510 and 3,769 times what their company’s most typical employee earned, with the year’s top-paid chief exec collecting $199 million.

Under the SEC’s “new wrinkle” accounting approach, all the ten highest-paid U.S. chief execs in 2023 saw their compensation run over $199 million, with four of the top ten, analysts at Equilar calculate, making over $600 million and two more making over $300 million.