Meet the CEOs Who Pull In More Than $100 Million a Year
Chief executives at Pinterest, Peloton and Hertz are outearning Apple’s Tim Cook—and hundreds of others leading bigger companies
4 min
The highest-paid CEOs aren’t always the ones running the biggest companies.
The chief executives of Hertz, Peloton and Pinterest all earned more than $100 million in 2022, topping almost every CEO in the S&P 500 including Apple’s Tim Cook, who made $99 million. Also on that list: The man who runs CS Disco, a cloud-services provider that caters to attorneys and has a market capitalisation of about $500 million.
Six of the 10 highest-paid CEOs last year ran companies that weren’t in the S&P 500, according to C-Suite Comp, an executive-pay-data and analytics company. The S&P 500 comprises most of the biggest U.S. publicly traded companies.
Stephen Schwarzman of private-equity giant Blackstone earned the biggest pay package overall, at $253 million. Blackstone, larger than many S&P 500 companies at a market capitalisation of more than $100 billion, has a corporate structure similar to dual share-class setups that until recentlyhave kept other companies out of the index.
Schwarzman edged out Sundar Pichai, who runs Google parent Alphabet and received a pay package of $226 million—a total that put Pichai atop The Wall Street Journal’s annual CEO pay survey earlier this year. Pichai was followed in the earlier survey by Live Nation’s Michael Rapino, at $139 million.
Some executives in C-Suite Comp’s top-paid list, such as the leaders of Pinterest and Hertz, wouldn’t make the Journal’s annual pay ranking because those CEOs started during the year. The Journal’s analysis only ranks CEOs who served the full year.
Median pay for CEOs of S&P 500 companies slipped to $14.5 million last year, from $14.7 million the year before.
More broadly, nine CEOs made more than $100 million in 2022, of nearly 4,000 publicly traded U.S. companies in C-Suite Comp’s analysis. That is down from more than 20 a year earlier, as equity awards slimmed down, the firm said.
The bulk of CEO pay usually consists of restricted stock or options, the value of which can fluctuate. Many equity awards often only vest—becoming fully the executive’s property—if certain performance targets are met, or if the executive remains employed for a specified period.
For Schwarzman, Blackstone’s co-founder, about $190 million of his pay came in the form of carried interest and incentive-fee allocations. Carried interest refers to a cut of profit above a target that some investment managers receive. A further $58.8 million consisted of shares in real-estate investment trusts that Blackstone manages.
Schwarzman’s total pay was more than 50% larger than his 2021 package of $160 million. Total return for Blackstone shares, including the company’s dividend, was minus 40% last year, compared with minus 18% for the S&P 500. Through late June this year, Blackstone’s total return was 22%, compared with about 14% for the index.
Schwarzman owns almost 20% of Blackstone, a stake qualifying for dividends of about $1 billion in 2022.
A Blackstone spokesman said nearly 30% of Schwarzman’s 2022 pay reflects investment performance in 2021, in a period when the company’s share price also doubled. “Virtually all his compensation is carried interest and incentive fees—which are only paid when we deliver for our customers,” the spokesman said. He declined to say how much of Schwarzman’s pay was in cash.
At Hertz, Stephen Scherr’s total pay of $182 million included $3.4 million in salary and bonus. A further $178 million in restricted stock is structured to vest through 2026, much of it only if the company’s shares reach 90-day average price targets ranging up to nearly double its current share price.
In its annual proxy statement, Hertz said two price targets had already been met, meaning about $50 million in shares at recent prices stand to vest if Scherr stays employed through 2026, in addition to roughly $20 million that vested on Dec. 31.
Scherr, who earlier worked as Goldman Sachs Group’s chief financial officer, took Hertz’s top job in February 2022, about seven months after the rental-car chain emerged from bankruptcy-court protection.
Hertz shares fell 22% during Scherr’s tenure last year, while the S&P 500 fell 16%. The company valued Scherr’s equity award at roughly $128 million at year-end, securities filings show. Hertz shares were up about 20% this year through June 30.
A Hertz spokesman declined to comment beyond company disclosures.
Peloton’s Barry McCarthy started as CEO in February 2022, after stints as chief financial officer at Spotify and Netflix. His $168 million pay package at Peloton was almost entirely in stock options, which vest monthly over four years.
With Peloton trading near $7.50 in recent days, those eight million options are underwater, meaning they would cost more to exercise than the underlying shares are worth.
Peloton shares have fallen about 3% this year through June 30, and fell 79% in 2022 as declining demand left the company with a glut of the exercise bikes it sells.
Peloton representatives didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Of the $123 million Pinterest awarded Bill Ready last year, nearly $101 million came in stock options and $21.5 million in restricted stock made up most of the rest. Both were awarded in connection with his hiring as CEO in late June 2022.
The equity awards vest quarterly over four years if Ready remains employed. By year-end, Ready’s 2022 stock and option awards had increased in value to $153.6 million, Pinterest said in its securities filings.
Pinterest shares rose just over 20% last year. So far this year, Pinterest shares have risen about 13% through June 30.
A Pinterest spokeswoman said Ready isn’t expected to receive additional equity during his first four years, and the company sees his 2022 equity awards as the equivalent of about $30 million a year over that time. Ready also had to buy and hold $5 million in shares.
“If the company performs well, then Bill’s options have value,” the spokeswoman said. “If the company doesn’t perform well, then Bill’s compensation is going to be impacted.”
CS Disco, a 10-year-old Austin, Texas, company that sells online services to law firms, attorneys and legal-services companies, is the smallest company in the top-paid set. CEO Kiwi Camara, a co-founder, received $500,000 in salary plus stock options valued at $109 million, an award shareholders approved in a vote last year.
Camara’s options vest only if the company’s 90-day average share price reaches any of six targets through 2032, or if the company is acquired or Camara loses his job under certain circumstances.
Camara earned just under $1 million total in 2021, the year the company went public in late July. Its shares closed at $8.22 on Friday, up 30% for the year so far but down more than 75% from the company’s share price at the start of 2022.
CS Disco didn’t respond to requests for comment.
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Consumers are going to gravitate toward applications powered by the buzzy new technology, analyst Michael Wolf predicts
Chris Dixon, a partner who led the charge, says he has a ‘very long-term horizon’
Couples find that lab-grown diamonds make it cheaper to get engaged or upgrade to a bigger ring. But there are rocky moments.
4 min
Wedding planner Sterling Boulet has some advice for brides-to-be regarding lab-grown diamonds, which cost a fraction of the natural ones.
“If you’re trying to get your man to propose, they’ll propose faster if you offer this as an option,” says Boulet, of Raleigh, N.C. Recently, she adds, a friend’s fiancé “thanked me the next three times I saw him” for telling him about the cheaper lab-made option.
Man-made diamonds are catching on, despite some lingering stigma. This year was the first time that sales of lab-made and natural mined loose diamonds, primarily used as center stones in engagement rings, were split evenly, according to data from Tenoris, a jewellery and diamond trend-analytics company.
The rise of lab-made stones, however, is bringing up quirks alongside the perks. Now that blingier engagement rings—above two or three carats—are more affordable, more people are dealing with the peculiarities of wearing rather large rocks.
Esther Hare, a 5-foot-11-inch former triathlete, sought out a 4.5-carat lab-made oval-shaped diamond to fit her larger hands as a part of her vow renewal in Hawaii last year. It was a far cry from the half-carat ring her husband proposed with more than 25 years ago and the 1.5-carat upgrade they purchased 10 years ago. Hare, 50, who lives in San Jose, Calif., and works in high tech, chose a $40,000 lab-made diamond because “it’s nuts” to have to spend $100,000 on a natural stone. “It had to be big—that was my vision,” she says.
But the size of the ring has made it less practical at times. She doesn’t wear it for athletic training and swaps in her wedding band instead. And she is careful to leave it at home when traveling. “A lot of times I won’t take it on vacation because it’s just a monster,” she says.
The average retail price for a one-carat lab-made loose diamond decreased to $1,426 this year from $3,039 in 2020, according to the Tenoris data. Similar-sized loose natural diamonds cost $5,426 this year, compared with $4,943 in 2020.
Lab-made diamonds have essentially the same chemical makeup as natural ones, and look the same, unless viewed through sophisticated equipment that gauges the characteristics of emitted light.
At Ritani, an online jewellery retailer, lab-made diamond sales make up about 70% of the diamonds sold, up from roughly 30% two years ago, says Juliet Gomes, head of customer service at the company, based in White Plains, N.Y.
Ritani sometimes records videos of the lab-diamonds pinging when exposed to a “diamond tester,” a tool that judges authenticity, to show customers that the man-made rocks behave the same as natural ones. “We definitely have some deep conversations with them,” Gomes says.
Not all gem dealers are rolling with these stones.
Philadelphia jeweller Steven Singer only stocks the natural stuff in his store and is planning a February campaign to give about 1,000 one-carat lab-made diamonds away free to prove they are “worthless.” Anyone can sign up online and get one in the mail; even shipping is free. “I’m not selling Frankensteins that were built in a lab,” Singer says.
Some brides are turned off by the larger bling now allowed by the lower prices.When her now-husband proposed with a two-carat lab-grown engagement ring, Tiffany Buchert, 40, was excited about the prospect of marriage—but not about the size of the diamond, which she says struck her as “costume jewellery-ish.”
“I said yes in the moment, of course, I didn’t want it to be weird,” says the physician assistant from West Chester, Pa.
But within weeks, she says, she fessed up, telling her fiancé: “I think I hate this ring.”
The couple returned it and then bought a one-carat natural diamond for more than double the price.
When Boulet, the wedding planner in Raleigh, got engaged herself, she was over the moon when her fiancé proposed with a 2.3 carat lab-made diamond ring. “It’s very shiny, we were almost worried it was too shiny and was going to look fake,” she says.
It doesn’t, which presents another issue—looking like someone who really shelled out for jewellery. Boulet will occasionally volunteer that her diamond ring came from a lab.
“I don’t want people to think I’m putting on airs, or trying to be flashier than I am,” she says.
For Daniel Teoh, a 36-year-old software engineer outside of Detroit, buying a cheaper lab-made diamond for his fiancée meant extra room in his $30,000 ring budget.
Instead of a bigger ring, he got her something they could both enjoy. During a walk while on an annual ski trip to South Lake Tahoe, Calif., Teoh popped the question and handed his now-wife a handmade wooden box that included a 2.5-carat lab-made diamond ring—and a car key.
She put on the ring, celebrated with both of their sisters and a friend, who was the unofficial photographer of the happy event, and then they drove back to the house. There, she saw a 1965 Mustang GT coupe in Wimbledon white with red stripes and a bow on top.
Looking back, Teoh says, it was still the diamond that made the big first impression.
“It wasn’t until like 15 minutes later she was like ‘so, what’s with this key?’” he adds.
Consumers are going to gravitate toward applications powered by the buzzy new technology, analyst Michael Wolf predicts
Chris Dixon, a partner who led the charge, says he has a ‘very long-term horizon’
