money Intel CEO the highest paid CEO in 2021
Yahoo Finance Live’s Julie Hyman and Brian Sozzi discuss the CEOs of U.S. companies that brought in the most compensation in 2021.
Video Transcript
- Being the boss pays pretty well. Median CEO pay in the US rose by over 30% last year, hitting $20 million. That is according to a new study by Equilar.
Highest paid CEO on the list is a friend of the show, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, who took home $178 million. Apple CEO Tim Cook and Microsoft's CEO Satya Nadella also made the top five list. Surely it's good to have a friend of the show like that, right? Almost pulling in $200 million.
- I mean--
- We made it.
- It's so interesting to me because part of the argument that companies will make for paying their CEO so much is that that's the industry standard, right? For their particular industry. And obviously, you also see pay going up on lower levels, right?
To retain people. But Pat Gelsinger ain't going anywhere, right? He came back to the company.
[CHUCKLING]
Tim Cook is not going anywhere. Satya Nadella is not-- so you can't argue that this is retention pay.
- Mm-hmm.
- Because if they're going anywhere, they're going on their yacht or whatever to an island, right? They're not going to another company that's paying them more. That said, a lot of these are stock-related rewards.
- Good point.
- And so you see Apple shares have done well. Microsoft shares have certainly done well. And so that's part of the reason why the value of this compensation has risen.
- Hock Tan. He always flies under the radar, but he's pulling in-- the Broadcom CEO-- Broadcom, one of the largest semiconductors in the game, he's pulling in $61 million. I mean, Julie, how do you value what a CEO is worth? Is it just the stock price? It's-- this is--
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
- No, it's obviously not just the stock price. It's also the underlying financial performance of the company. I mean, you can't also just look at the median pay in isolation.
You have to look at the median pay to median worker pay, right? You have to look at the pay of the CEO compared to how the workers are doing. And I think that's something that's gotten so much attention, rightly so, in recent years. Now the individual pay of regular workers is also starting to creep up. But obviously, the gap is still enormous.
- Well--
- And I don't care how good Tim Cook is. Does he need to be making almost $100 million? I don't know.
- I'm confident, Julie, if we continue-- if you and I continue down our path and continue to work hard, we'll make $178 million too.
- I am not, but--
- Do you want to touch on Disney and Netflix real quick?
- I don't think we have time.
- All right, well--
- We'll have to talk about it tomorrow after Netflix reports.
- All right, fine. Fine. I think a bad quarter for Netflix is good for Disney. I'll leave it there.
