The Highest-Paid CEOs of 2024
Sundar Pichai, Andy Jassy, and Hock Tan led U.S. public-company CEO pay in fiscal 2024, each earning well over $150 million in total disclosed compensation — almost entirely in stock. Below is the full ranking, the executives whose pay swung the most from the year before, and how the balance between cash and stock compensation varies by industry. Every figure is pulled directly from SEC DEF 14A proxy filings; see our methodology for how we source and verify the data.
The 15 Highest-Paid CEOs of 2024
Total compensation as reported in each company's most recent FY2024 proxy filing.
Biggest Pay Increases
Comparing each executive's FY2024 total to their prior year on record.
Pay tracked Nvidia's AI-driven run in fiscal 2024, with a much larger equity award than the prior year.
Western Digital's storage business benefited from AI-driven demand in 2024.
A larger equity award accompanied FedEx's cost-cutting and restructuring push.
Gelsinger was ousted as Intel's CEO in December 2024; this figure reflects his compensation for the fiscal year, not a reward for the outcome.
The comparison spans several years, not one — Adobe's most recent prior disclosure on record predates 2024 by multiple fiscal years.
Biggest Pay Decreases
Large year-over-year drops are almost always a timing effect, not a pay cut — see the note on each.
A large multi-year equity grant vested in the prior year and wasn't repeated in 2024.
Same pattern — a large prior-year equity award, not a pay cut in the ongoing sense.
Another equity-vesting cliff rather than a change in ongoing compensation.
Consistent with the broader pattern: a one-time equity award didn't recur.
A smaller-scale version of the same equity-timing effect.
Cash vs. Stock, by Industry
Median share of total FY2024 pay from stock awards vs. cash (salary + bonus), across companies tracked in each sector.
Every industry we track skews toward equity over cash, but the gap varies widely — automotive and technology executives draw the largest share of their pay from stock, while finance and real estate run comparatively more cash-weighted, reflecting differences in how those sectors typically structure long-term incentive pay.
Methodology
Figures are drawn from the Summary Compensation Table of each company's DEF 14A proxy filing with the SEC, the same dataset that powers every company and executive page on ExecSalaries. Year-over-year comparisons use each executive's two most recent fiscal years on record, which aren't always consecutive if a company skipped a filing year in our coverage. See our full methodology page, and our corrections policy if you spot a figure that looks wrong.