S&P 500 companies' highest and lowest paid CEOs of 2018
The stats are finally in for how much the heads of S&P 500 companies made in 2018.
David M. Zaslav, the president and chief executive officer of media company Discovery, Inc., came in at No. 1 with compensation of $129.4 million, according to the Wall Street Journal's analysis of data from MyLogIQ. The total is a combination of cash pay, stock pay and other sources.
Zaslav's pay is "nearly all performance-based," the company said.
In March 2018, he oversaw Discovery's acquisition of another media company -- Scripps Networks Interactive, whose channel properties include the Food Network and HGTV. In June 2018, Discovery said it formed a 12-year partnership with the PGA Tour, which "includes global multiplatform live rights outside the United States to all PGA TOUR media properties totaling approximately 2,000 hours of content per year."
Zaslav's pay in 2018 was nearly double that of Stephen F. Angel, the CEO of industrial gases and engineering company Linde, and Robert A. Iger, the CEO of The Walt Disney Company, who came in Nos. 2 and 3, respectively.
Conversely, the lowest paid S&P 500 chiefs were Larry Page, the CEO of Alphabet, and Jack Dorsey, the co-founder and CEO of Twitter.
Page has taken a symbolic payment of $1 every year since 2004, when Google went public, according to the Motley Fool. During restructuring in 2015, Alphabet became the parent company of Google and its subsidiaries. Page owns 20 million Class B shares and 20 million Class C shares of Alphabet, making him the company's largest shareholder, according to Investopedia. Forbes also listed Page as having a net worth of $54.2 billion.
Dorsey, on the other hand, didn't take a salary until 2018, when he accepted payment of $1.40 -- a reference to Twitter's old limit of 140 characters per tweet. The character limit was extended to 280 in November 2017.
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“As a testament to his commitment to and belief in Twitter’s long-term value creation potential, our CEO, Jack Dorsey, declined all compensation and benefits for 2015, 2016 and 2017, and in 2018 he declined all compensation and benefits other than a salary of $1.40,” the firm said in a SEC regulatory filing.
Dorsey, who is also the CEO of Square, earned $80 million in 2018 after he sold 1.7 million shares of his shares in the mobile payments company, according to Forbes. The outlet also listed his net worth as $4.8 billion.
| Ticker | Security | Last | Change | Change % |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| DISCA | n.a. | n.a. | n.a. | n.a. |
| LIN | LINDE PLC | 444.32 | -0.74 | -0.17% |
| DIS | THE WALT DISNEY CO. | 113.97 | +0.26 | +0.22% |
| GOOGL | ALPHABET INC. | 159.13 | +0.87 | +0.55% |
| TWTR | n.a. | n.a. | n.a. | n.a. |