America's Highest Paid CEOs

CEO of McKesson, John H. Hammergren
Our report on executive compensation will only fuel the outrage over corporate greed. In 2011 the chief executives of the 500 biggest companies in the U.S. (as measured by a composite ranking of sales, profits, assets and market value) got a collective pay raise of 16% last year, to $5.2 billion. This compares with a 3% pay raise for the average American worker. The total averages out to $10.5 million apiece. The value realized from exercised stock options and vested stock awards are the main components of total pay, accounting for 61%. The average stock gain was $3.2 million, up from $2.7 last year. Average value of vested stock awards was $3.1 million, up from $2.5 . Combined salary and bonus was up an average 8% to $3.5 million.
Click here to see two decades of CEO pay and how this year's CEO pay stacks up to past years.
So much for the moral suasion granted to shareholders last year with the first-ever say-on-pay votes for U.S. public companies. A no vote, already a rare thing, is hardly ever binding. You can see the results of our 11th annual long-term look at performance and pay in our bang-for-the-buck scorecard to see who are America's Best CEOs. We measure the pay of CEOs with at least a six-year tenure against the company’s stock performance versus its peers and the S&P500.