FILE – In this Thursday, May 7, 2009, file photo, Honeywell Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Dave Cote listens to a question from a journalist after inaugurating the company’s new facility in Bangalore, India. Cote was one of the highest-paid CEOs for 2015, as calculated by The Associated Press and Equilar, an executive data firm. (AP Photo/Aijaz Rahi, File)Top paid CEOs
› Chattanooga: Jeffrey S. Lorberbaum, Mohawk Industries, $6.1 million › Tennessee: William Carpenter III, LifePoint Health, $15.2 million › Georgia: Martin Flanagan, Invesco, $15.9 million › Alabama: Jay Grinney, HealthSouth, $7.8 million › United States: Dara Khosrowshahi, Expedia, $94.6 million Source: Company proxy statements
FILE – In this Tuesday, Dec. 8, 2015, file photo, Comcast chairman and CEO Brian Roberts speaks at the conference “Ignition: Future of Digital,” in New York. Roberts was one of the highest-paid CEOs for 2015, as calculated by The Associated Press and Equilar, an executive data firm. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan, File)CEOs at the biggest companies got a 4.5 percent pay raise last year. That’s almost double the typical American worker’s, and a lot more than investors earned from owning their stocks – a big fat zero.
The typical chief executive in the Standard & Poor’s 500 index made $10.8 million, including bonuses, stock awards and other compensation, according to a study by executive data firm Equilar for The Associated Press. That’s up from the median of $10.3 million the same group of CEOs made a year earlier.
The raise alone for median CEO pay last year, $468,449, is more than 10 times what the typical U.S. worker makes in a year. The median full-time worker earned $809 weekly in 2015, up from $791 in 2014.
“With inflation running at less than 2 percent, why?” asks Charles Elson, director of the John L. Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware.