Beating Wall Street’s profit expectations is hard enough. CEOs of major US companies must also deal with issues like tariffs, climate change and diversity, equity and inclusion, with the Trump administration constantly changing the rules of the game.

Being CEO is a tough gig, no question. But the pay? It’s fabulous.

And it’s so much better than what the rank-and-file will ever get. These days, it’s particularly lucrative to be the CEO of a company with government security ties, corporate executive compensation filings show.

Take Alex Karp. He’s the CEO of Palantir Technologies, a data analysis and technology firm that has been in the news for helping the Trump administration collect and compile personal information on millions of Americans. Palantir also works for the US military, police forces and US immigration and Customs Enforcement, as well as many other corporations.

Palantir disclosed that Karp received $US6.8 billion ($10.5 billion) in “compensation actually paid” in 2024, a figure bolstered by Palantir’s soaring share price, which last year swelled the value of the stock and options awarded to him.

That windfall made Karp the highest-paid CEO of a publicly traded company in the United States last year, according to a survey done for The New York Times by the executive compensation research firm Equilar of all corporate filings through May.

“Compensation actually paid” is one of two major ways of accounting for CEO pay required under the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010. It emphasises the annual changes in the value of an executive’s current and potential stock holdings and reveals the staggering gains of executives, often company founders, who have been granted substantial stakes in their enterprises.

Government regulators required that “compensation actually paid” be included universally in corporate filings for 2023. I started to focus on it only last year. But it’s a rule already being scrutinised by the Trump administration for possible streamlining or even elimination.

Karp was in second place in last year’s report with nearly $US1.1 billion in gains, trailing Elon Musk, the Tesla CEO, who gained $US1.4 billion. Musk’s name is absent from the top-paid lists this year, but he has been fighting in the courts to retain a past, gargantuan pay package that a judge in Delaware has voided twice.

The Tesla shares in that contested pay package were worth more than $US98 billion at the end of May, according to Courtney Yu, director of research at Equilar. Musk funnelled $US250 million into President Donald Trump’s campaign efforts and was behind the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. Facing declining sales at Tesla, he has left the White House for renewed work at his companies, which also include SpaceX, a rocket company and military contractor; X, a social media platform; and xAI, an artificial intelligence company.

Classic compensation

There’s another important way to look at executive compensation: the estimated value of a pay package when it was originally granted. This annual snapshot must also be disclosed by corporations, thanks to government requirements that were tightened under Dodd-Frank. This more traditional approach, which the Times has covered regularly with the help of Equilar since 2012, tends to produce smaller figures for CEO compensation than the “compensation actually paid” approach. But the numbers are still enormous, compared with the earnings of most working people. It, too, is being reevaluated by the Trump administration.

The biggest payday in corporate America last year, using this traditional measure of executive compensation, went to Peter Gassner of Veeva Systems, a cloud-computing company focused on the life sciences, with a total compensation of $US172.4 million, nearly all from stock options and awards. The median employee at the company earned $US137,866. It would take a worker at Veeva Systems 1251 years to earn what Gassner did in 2024.

Motivating executives is one thing. Rewarding them like absolute monarchs is another.

In a statement, Veeva said Gassner’s compensation reflected a stock option grant that depended on the company’s share performance and “is intended as Mr. Gassner’s only equity compensation through 2030.” The company said his $US475,000 salary is “one of the lowest” for CEOs at publicly traded companies.

Right behind Gassner on the top-pay list was Patrick W. Smith, aka Rick Smith, who was a founder of Axon Enterprise. It was previously called TASER International and was named for what is still Axon’s best-known product: Tasers.

The company says its product line also includes “body cameras, in-car cameras, cloud-hosted digital evidence management solutions, productivity software and real-time operations capabilities.”

Smith’s total compensation in 2024, using traditional accounting, was $US164.5 million.

In a statement, the company said that number reflected “a long-term, performance-based equity award,” which he would receive only “over seven years, contingent on Axon meeting ambitious performance goals.”

The median Axon employee was paid $US205,322 in 2024, handsome wages compared with salaries at most companies.

Even so, because Smith’s compensation package was so big, it would take an Axon employee 801 years to earn Smith’s pay for just one year. And, using the compensation-actually-paid metric, he earned vastly more: $US385 million in 2024. Gassner at Veeva Systems raked in $US284 million using that measure.

The big picture

Corporate compensation filings are tedious reading, but they are a trove of information. That may be why they have never been uniformly popular in corner offices and why the Trump administration is beginning a process that could lead to the curtailment or demise of some of these disclosure requirements. In my view, that would be a shame. I would hate to lose access to any of the details being revealed by public corporations.

Consider some of the highlights from this year’s disclosures, compiled by Equilar.

All told, for the 100 highest-paid CEOs of publicly traded companies in 2024, the median CEO compensation, much of it from stock options, was $US37 million, using the traditional accounting metric.

That is a big number. Comparing it with what corporate employees make is revealing. The median worker at these companies was paid $US110,125, which is an astonishingly big pay gap. It would take the median employee — the one right in the middle of the income distribution — 357 years to earn what the median CEO earned in just one year. And using comparable, historical data that excludes the compensation at private equity firms, the pay ratio at publicly traded companies is almost 350-to-1, or, simply, 350, which is more than ever before.

As I’ve pointed out before, pay disparities of this magnitude reflect levels of income inequality that were considered repugnant 50 years ago. The American social structure was flatter and CEO-to-worker pay ratios were lower then. Motivating executives is one thing. Rewarding them like absolute monarchs is another. Through the 1970s, one study found, the pay ratio for big companies was less than 20. In the 1980s, Peter F. Drucker, the economist and Wall Street Journal columnist, said it felt “about right” when CEOs received 10 to 12 times what workers earned.

Yes, it’s better to be the boss. Anybody in the workforce already knows this without seeing any of these details. But the details matter. Happily, for investors and for rank-and-file workers, we now have considerable information on exactly how well CEOs are paid — and how much more money they receive than everybody else.

The Securities and Exchange Commission will convene later this month for a formal discussion about whether to change the rules about what companies need to reveal about CEO pay. Many companies would like less public disclosure. But after 15 years of looking at this issue, I think we need much more.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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