In most cases, a larger salary for a company's CEO is a given — unless you're Mark Zuckerberg and paying yourself $1 a year. How much more a CEO should get paid compared to the average worker, however, is yet to be examined (and lowering that pay, as This American Life found, is much more difficult than expected).
Soon, however, this might change; last month, The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission voted to require public companies to reveal the salary differences between their CEOs and other employees. In light of that, a recent Glassdoor study crunched the numbers to find the worst offenders in high CEO pay. On average, CEOs made 204 times what the average employee makes. Within the 500 companies examined, CEOs were paid an average of $13.8 million per year. Meanwhile, an average worker was paid $77,800.
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In 2014, CEO David Zaslav was paid $156 million. That's 1,950 times what the company's average employee makes.
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In some cases, however, that ratio was much, much higher. The worst offender? Discovery Communications, where the median employee pay was $80,000. In 2014, CEO David Zaslav was paid $156 million. That's 1,950 times what the company's average employee makes.
Other companies with an incredibly large CEO-to-employee pay gaps included CVS Health (the CEO makes 1,192 times the average employee salary), Walmart (1,133 times the average), and Target (939 times the average).
Quite a few companies had surprisingly low ratios, however; Amazon's CEO vs. employee pay ratio is just 15 (the CEO makes $1.7 million, while the median employee pay is $114,352). Google's CEO, Larry Page, has only been paid $1 a year (like Zuckerberg) since the company went public — a common move among tech CEOs who have already made their money and/or take home a hefty amount of stock.
For more about employee-CEO salary ratios, check out Glassdoor's study, here.
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