Rightly or wrongly, Wall Street CEOs are still excoriated as greedy fat cats who exemplify everything that’s wrong with executive pay.
But look around corporate America these days, and you’ll find any number of executives, particularly in tech, taking home far more than those bankers ever made—even during the boom years before the financial crisis—without a fraction of the scrutiny or the outrage.
It’s a small price to pay, companies lavishing those lofty compensation packages say, as long as their stock prices keep going up.
No one embodies this better than Elon Musk, the space and electric-car titan who was the highest-paid executive in the U.S. for 2019 with $595.3 million, according to the Bloomberg Pay Index. The money stems from the pay deal he scored a couple of years ago: A promise of a haul in the tens of billions of dollars if Tesla Inc. became one of the world’s most valuable firms.
But as the coronavirus pandemic lays bare the country’s economic inequalities, critics again point out the reality obscured by the rebounding stock market: An economy that’s working extraordinarily well for some but less so for many others.
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