Last fall, on a Financial Survival podcast, Discount Gold and Silver Trading CEO Melody Cedarstrom and I talked about a study showing that top CEOs made 399 times more than the average worker.
According to the Economic Policy Institute report, written by Josh Bivens and Jori Kandra, CEOs of the largest firms (in the U.S.) earn far more today than they did in the mid-1990s and many times what they earned in the 1960s and 70s.
The average pay for top CEOs was $15.6 million in 2021, up about 10% over 2020.
The ratio of CEO-to-typical-worker compensation has grown to an astounding 399-to-1.
That’s up from 366-to-1 in 2020 and a big increase from 20-to-1 in 1965 and 59-to-1 in 1989.
CEOs are even making a lot more than other wage earners in the top 0.1% – almost seven times as much.
In fact, from 1978-2021, CEO pay based on realized compensation grew by 1,460%. That far outstrips S&P stock market growth (1,063%) and top 0.1% earnings growth (385% between 1978 and 2020).
On the other far side of the continuum, compensation for the everyday American worker grew by just 18.1% from 1978 to 2021.
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