When CEO pay exploded (update)
Planet Money
NPR
4.6 • 29.8K Ratings
🗓️ 17 September 2025
⏱️ 23 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
It’s no secret that CEOs get paid a ton – and a ton more than the average worker. More than a hundred times than what their average employee makes.
But it wasn’t always this way. So, how did this gap get so vast? And why?
On today’s episode … we go back to a specific moment when the way CEOs were paid got changed. It involves Bill Clinton's campaign promises, and Silicon Valley workers taking to the streets to protest an accounting rule. And of course, Dodd Frank.
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This episode was hosted by Jacob Goldstein and Stacey Vanek Smith, and was originally produced by Nick Fountain. This update was reported and produced by Willa Rubin and edited by Alex Goldmark.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Quick warning, there is some profanity in this episode. |
| 0:03.8 | This is Planet Money from NPR. |
| 0:09.1 | Are CEOs paid too much? |
| 0:12.8 | A question you will hear often. |
| 0:15.0 | And let's just look at some random numbers here from a Harvard list of top paid CEOs. |
| 0:20.3 | We've got David Zazlov here of Warner |
| 0:22.5 | Brothers Discovery. Looks like he made $52 million in compensation last year. We've got another |
| 0:28.9 | David here, David Gitlin of Carrier Global, the heating and air conditioning company. He made |
| 0:33.3 | $66 million last year. Patrick Smith of Axon Enterprises, that's a company that makes tasers, |
| 0:39.6 | he made $165 million last year. It was not always like this. And so how did we get to this point |
| 0:47.1 | where CEOs are making this much money? Well, Jacob Goldstein and Stacey Vanek-Smith did a show |
| 0:52.5 | about this back in 2016, about this one particular moment when all of a sudden CEOs did start getting paid a lot more. So we're going to play that one for you now. And then at the end, we've got an update on what has changed in the decade since. So here's Jacob and Stacey. Stacey, the other day, I was looking at this chart. I've brought it into the studio. The chart is average pay for CEOs at big U.S. corporations over the past several decades. And I saw something really surprising. I'd always assumed, you know, that CEO pay just goes up and up and up, kind of a steady way year after year. But what this chart clearly shows is, in fact, there is this one |
| 1:28.8 | moment. I can put my finger on it here. It's right in the mid-1990s where CEO pay goes |
| 1:34.7 | bananas, right? Before then, it's kind of inch and along. And then just all of a sudden, |
| 1:39.5 | mid-90s, boom, straight up. And, you know, when I say it goes bananas, I don't even mean that in like a value judgment |
| 1:46.0 | kind of way. |
| 1:46.7 | I just mean whatever you think about CEO pay, anybody would look at this chart, point to this |
| 1:52.6 | moment in history, and say, what happened right here? |
| 1:57.6 | Hello and welcome to Planet Money. |
| 1:59.6 | I'm Stacey Vanek-Smith. |
| 2:00.7 | And I'm Jacob Goldstein. Today on the show, that's our show. What happened with CEO Pay right here? |
| 2:10.6 | The story of this moment when CEO Pay started going up really fast, among other things, it's like a story of unintended consequences. |
... |
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