Highest-Paid U.S. CEOs 2026 vs. 2024 Shareholder Returns

Highest-Paid U.S. CEOs: Latest Disclosed Pay as of January 2026, Benchmarked Against 2024 Shareholder Returns

In January 2026, “highest-paid CEO” headlines still mostly point to compensation recorded for 2024. That lag isn’t a media trick; it’s the way U.S. public-company disclosure works, because the biggest pay packages surface when proxy statements are filed and parsed, not when the work is done.

That timing matters, because it changes what the ranking is really measuring. This is not a live scoreboard of who “earned the most” last year in a cash sense. It’s a snapshot of reported compensation value—often dominated by equity awards—captured at grant-date valuations, under rules that can make one year look like a moonshot even when the CEO’s realised outcomes are still uncertain.

The list below uses the most widely cited “top 10” cut from the Equilar / New York Times pay study, which extracts the largest 2024 CEO pay packages from U.S. public companies meeting the study’s methodology (including a proxy-statement filing cutoff).

This article adds a second lens that the headline lists usually dodge: how each company’s 2024 pay package sits next to 2024 total shareholder return, because pay without owner outcomes is just accounting theatre.

*Lineage was newly public in 2024, so a single “yearly return” figure is a blunt comparator versus long-listed peers.

Sources: Equilar/NYT (compensation, FY2024 revenue) and FinanceCharts (2024 yearly total return).

Why January 2026 Still Points to 2024 Pay Numbers

The central reason you can’t cleanly publish a definitive “2025 highest-paid CEOs” list in early January 2026 is that much of the underlying 2025 compensation disclosure is not yet filed in a consistent, comparable way. The most comprehensive mainstream studies are built from proxies filed on a schedule, and that schedule creates an unavoidable delay.

Even when a company has already held its annual meeting, the data that matters for ranking purposes is typically pulled from the proxy’s compensation tables and supporting narrative. Those filings come in waves, and the biggest studies set cut-off windows to avoid mixing apples with half-filed oranges.

There is also a second, less obvious issue: “2025 pay” often includes grants awarded in 2025 for performance periods that extend for multiple years, and the accounting value can be heavily influenced by the company’s share price and grant structure at the moment of award. That makes early, piecemeal comparisons risky, because you end up ranking structure and timing as much as leadership or performance.

The 2024 Pay Peak and What Actually Drove It

The top end of the 2024 ranking is dominated by equity, and that fact carries asymmetry in how pay packages present to the public. A CEO can look “overpaid” on paper even when the award is designed to be worthless unless ambitious targets are met, and equally a CEO can look modestly paid while still holding enormous wealth through prior equity accumulation.

In the Equilar / New York Times top-ten table for 2024, Axon’s Patrick W. Smith leads at $164.5 million, followed by Coherent’s James Robert Anderson at $101.5 million, and Starbucks’ Brian R. Niccol at $95.8 million, with the remainder of the top ten clustered in the $61–$87 million range.

A key point that gets lost in the outrage cycle is that the list is not measuring the same thing across every company in the same way. Some packages are heavily shaped by one-off grants, “make-whole” awards to compensate for equity left behind at a prior employer, or multi-year performance structures that inflate the reported value in a single year.

That’s why the more useful question is not “who got paid the most,” but “what outcome did owners receive in the same period,” and “is the compensation design plausibly tied to that outcome in a way that holds up under scrutiny.”

Axon and Coherent Show How Equity Awards Can Explode

Axon’s top spot is the cleanest example of how a single grant can dominate a year’s compensation narrative. Patrick W. Smith’s $164.5 million package is overwhelmingly stock-award driven in the Equilar table, which means the ranking is reflecting the valuation of equity awards rather than a cash payday.

Now add the shareholder lens and the story becomes more coherent. Axon’s 2024 total return was 130.06%, which is the kind of year that makes performance-linked equity look less like indulgence and more like an expensive version of alignment—assuming the award is actually contingent and not simply guaranteed wealth transfer.

Coherent is similar in headline shape but different in implication. James Robert Anderson’s $101.5 million reported package sits beside a 2024 total return of 117.62%, which again suggests that owners did well in the same year the compensation number spiked, even if the pay design deserves its own forensic review.

The risk, and it’s a real one, is that readers conflate “pay value reported this year” with “pay earned this year.” Equity-heavy packages create granularity problems: the disclosed number can be huge, while the realised value can be meaningfully lower or higher depending on future performance, vesting terms, and stock volatility.

When Pay Is Huge but Shareholder Returns Are Mixed

Starbucks is where the pay-versus-owner lens immediately introduces tension. Brian R. Niccol’s reported 2024 package of $95.8 million sits next to a 2024 total return of -2.48%, meaning owners did not receive a positive year even as the compensation figure landed near the top of the table.

General Electric reads differently, because the company’s 2024 total return was 64.94%, which is a robust shareholder outcome that makes H. Lawrence Culp, Jr.’s $87.4 million reported package easier to defend in principle, even if the absolute number still invites questions about pay calibration.

Ares Management adds another texture. Michael J. Arougheti’s $85.4 million sits alongside a 2024 total return of 52.68%, a strong year that can justify meaningful incentive outcomes if performance hurdles are real, measured, and not retrofitted after the fact.

Microsoft is the opposite of the “pay exploded because stock exploded” narrative. Satya Nadella’s $79.1 million is paired with a 2024 total return of 12.93%, which is positive but not in the same universe as Axon or Coherent. That gap invites a more nuanced question: how much of the pay number is annual incentive, how much is long-term equity design, and how much is the market’s forward-looking pricing rather than year-specific execution.

Apple’s Tim Cook at $74.6 million sits beside a 2024 total return of 30.71%, a solid owner outcome that looks more “normal” in the context of mega-cap pay levels, even if reasonable people can still debate what “normal” should mean when the scale of the enterprise is measured in trillions.

Pay Versus Total Shareholder Return: A Better Reality Check

This is where the ranking becomes more than a spectacle. If you put the 2024 pay numbers next to 2024 shareholder returns, you can start to separate packages that are at least directionally consistent with owner outcomes from packages that look socially explosive while owners experienced little benefit or even pain.

In the “aligned on direction” bucket, Axon and Coherent stand out because their 2024 total returns were 130.06% and 117.62% respectively, which means shareholders saw extraordinary appreciation in the same year the reported CEO pay packages peaked. That doesn’t prove good governance, but it reduces the credibility of the simplest accusation that “nothing was delivered.”

GE and Ares are the next tier, where returns were 64.94% and 52.68%. In these cases, the debate is less about whether value was created at all and more about the size of the slice allocated to the CEO, the performance hurdles embedded in the awards, and whether the pay committee applied genuine discipline rather than benchmarking themselves into absurdity.

Then you get the “high pay, moderate return” group. Apple’s 30.71%, Carrier’s 20.26%, and Microsoft’s 12.93% raise a shared question about anchoring: are boards setting pay with any reference to year-specific owner results, or are they essentially paying for role difficulty and market competition regardless of that year’s shareholder experience.

Netflix is worth pausing on, because its 83.07% 2024 total return looks like an outlier in a good way, yet Theodore A. Sarandos’ reported $61.9 million sits at the bottom of the top-ten pay list. That contrast is a reminder that “top ten pay” is not the same as “best year for shareholders,” and it also underscores how compensation design and timing can create variance between pay rankings and performance narratives.

Lineage is the structural exception that makes this benchmarking exercise imperfect. W. Gregory Lehmkuhl’s $69.3 million package appears in the top ten, but Lineage was newly public in 2024, which means a single full-year TSR figure is a blunt tool; IPO timing, lockups, and post-listing price discovery make “2024 total return” a less meaningful governance comparator than it is for long-listed peers.

The practical takeaway is not that TSR is the only lens that matters, but that TSR forces the conversation away from vibes and toward outcomes. It also highlights where reputational risk and investor scrutiny should logically concentrate: high reported pay paired with weak owner experience, or high pay paired with opaque long-term targets that nobody outside the boardroom can evaluate.

Why Musk, Ellison and Jensen Huang Aren’t in This Top-Ten

Elon Musk is the most common “missing name,” and the simplest explanation is that he is not “missing from the rich,” he is missing from this particular measurement. In Tesla’s proxy disclosures, Musk has been shown with no compensation reported for 2024, and the broader controversy around his pay has centered on his 2018 package and subsequent governance and legal fights rather than a fresh 2024 “top ten” number.

Larry Ellison is a different case entirely, because public perception often treats him as “the Oracle CEO,” while corporate reality and titles can be more complex. CEO pay studies are typically CEO-specific within the covered period, not “most influential founder” or “largest wealth holder,” so they can exclude leaders who hold different roles even when their influence is enormous.

Jensen Huang is the instructive “this is why the list is not about wealth” example. Nvidia’s share performance has been extraordinary, but a CEO’s disclosed annual compensation can remain far smaller than the value of their existing equity holdings. Reporting around the same Equilar / NYT study has put Huang’s latest disclosed compensation well below top-ten territory, even while his wealth is driven by long-held Nvidia stock rather than a single-year pay spike.

So the absence of these names is not a data failure as much as a category error. People hear “highest paid” and think “richest” or “most famous,” when the ranking is actually “largest disclosed annual CEO compensation packages under a specific study’s methodology, in a specific disclosure window.”

What to Watch in 2025 Filings and the Next Rankings

If you want true 2025 pay visibility, the honest answer is that January 2026 is still early. The most useful new information will arrive as 2026 proxy season progresses, because that is when comparable 2025 compensation tables become broadly available and can be compiled without mixing partial data sets.

The more important story, however, may not be who tops the list next, but whether boards change how they defend these packages. Investor tolerance for pay that looks disconnected from outcomes is not infinite, and even when owners do well, the legitimacy of the system still depends on credible performance conditions rather than cosmetic targets.

You should also watch for where pay is delivered. Equity-heavy awards can be designed to create long-term alignment, but they can also be designed to transfer value with minimal challenge, and the difference is mostly found in the fine print: vesting schedules, performance metrics, threshold difficulty, and whether goals are absolute or relative.

Finally, keep an eye on the narrative boards use to justify these packages in the first place. The next evolution of the pay debate is not just “big number bad,” but whether boards can articulate a theory of value creation with enough durability that the compensation plan still makes sense when the market stops being friendly and the real test arrives.