August 27, 2025                                                         Home   Subscribe  Open in Browser

Last week we released our annual Executive Excess report exposing in stark detail just how much CEO pay has soared while worker pay has stalled. 

Our report sent flacks for overpaid CEOs running for cover. Reporters for the Guardian and Barron’s reached out to Starbucks, Walmart, Home Depot, Lowe’s, and Ulta Beauty for comment. Not one of them would respond. 

That's not surprising, given the indefensible pay gap figures our report details. For the third year in a row, we zeroed in on the 100 S&P 500 firms with the lowest median wages, a group we’ve dubbed the “Low-Wage 100.” Our blockbuster finding: The CEOs at these companies now earn 632 times more than their typical workers.

Average CEO pay at the Low-Wage 100, over the past six years, has jumped at over double the rate of median worker pay. In other words, at a time when U.S. workers are struggling with rising costs for groceries and housing, the nation’s largest low-wage employers are making their overpaid CEOs even richer. 

Between 2019 and 2024, these firms spent $644 billion on stock buybacks, a scam that artificially inflates the value of a company’s stock — and CEO pay. Every dollar spent on buybacks represents a dollar not spent on workers.

The tradeoffs can be downright staggering. At Lowe’s, for instance, every one of the retail giant’s 273,000 employees could have received an annual $28,456 bonus over the past six years with the money the retailer blew on stock buybacks. Half of Lowe’s workers made less than $31,000 last year.

Such disparities are not just bad for workers – they’re also bad for our democracy. 

“This gap between CEO and worker pay,” I summed up for the Financial Times last week, is driving “rising inequality and the concentration of wealth at the top” and giving our ultra-wealthy “too much influence over our political system.” 

Much more from our new Executive Excess report below.

Sarah Anderson
for the Institute for Policy Studies’ Inequality.org team

We Can Use Our Tax System to Discourage Excessive CEO Compensation

Excessive CEO pay has Americans across the political spectrum frustrated. Our government, Americans believe, ought to be doing something about that excess.  One option: Lawmakers could be levying higher taxes on corporations with particularly wide gaps between CEO and worker pay. 

Such a move would likely be overwhelmingly popular. In one survey of likely voters, 89 percent of Democrats, 77 percent of Independents, and 71 percent of Republicans said they’d like to see tax hikes on companies that pay their CEOs more than 50 times what they pay their median employees.

Read more about antidotes to CEO greed from Sarah Anderson below.

Between 2019 and 2024, average CEO compensation within major U.S. low-wage corporations rose 34.7 percent in nominal — unadjusted for inflation — terms, more than double the 16.3 percent increase in these firms’ average median worker pay. The U.S. inflation rate over this same period: 22.6 percent.

For an interactive version of this chart and more on CEO-worker pay gaps, click the link below to our full Executive Excess report.

Could Coca-Cola Ever Be Sweeter than the Coke CEO’s Pay?

This week’s dour deep pocket: James Quincey, the Coca-Cola CEO who last year pulled down $28 million in pay, 1,980 times what Coke’s most typical workers earned and 49.7 percent more, adds the latest Institute for Policy Studies Executive Excess report, than what Quincey made in 2019.

What has Quincey sour: Donald Trump’s crowing over Coca-Cola’s decision to offer Americans a Coke made with cane sugar instead of high-fructose corn syrup. U.S. Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has called corn syrup “just a formula for making you obese and diabetic.”

“I have been speaking to Coca-Cola about using REAL Cane Sugar in Coke in the United States, and they have agreed to do so,” Trump gloated last month on Truth Social. “You’ll see. It’s just better!”

In fact, both corn syrup and cane sugar, a 2021 National Institutes of Health-funded study found, increase fatty liver disease and Type 2 diabetes, with “no significant differences” between the two.

The last word: Celebrating the swap of cane sugar for high-fructose corn syrup “as a win for public health,” notes Eva Greenthal at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, “makes no sense.”

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