US executive pay dwarfs UK best-paid bosses pay checks: These CEOs are paid 200 times as much as their employees
American bosses earn 204 times more than their workers – blowing British pay gaps out of the water.
The best-paid FTSE 100 chief is WPP’s Martin Sorrell, but despite taking home 800 times more than his employees, his £29.8m pay check last year doesn’t even come close to the US record high.
David Zaslav, chief executive of Discovery Communications, gets 1,951 as much in his pay check as his employees, earning $156m last year.
On average, British companies pay their chief executives 130 times more than their employees. In the US, this goes up to 204 times, according to new figures from recruitment firm Glassdoor, who compared official data on executive salaries with a median worker salary based on self-reported figures collected through their site.
American executive pay has jumped 937 per cent over 35 years. In the same period, the average employee pay check has only grown by 10.2 per cent, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
There are some notable exceptions, though:
Google’s Larry Page, founder and chief executive until the company’s great Alphabet shakeup two weeks ago, took home no more than $1 last year. (No, that isn’t a typo.)