CEO Pay: The $25 Million Plus Pay Club (2025)

We’re just about through 2025 proxy season which is a good point to check-in on executive compensation and Say-On-Pay voting. At about the same time last year we published our first “$25 Million Plus CEO Pay Club” listing. This year’s list is longer — now with 97 CEOs receiving more $25M or more in pay as reported in their 2025 proxy filing. We provide the full listing of below and some highlights before that.

What remains clear is there can be a significant disconnect between pay and company performance. Many will argue that with equity making up such a large component of pay packages that the CEO and shareholders are aligned. But, we don’t think that always reflects reality as the equity still has material value even in scenarios where shareholders see the stock price drop and suffer personal investment losses. So, when performance is lagging (or worse) we tend to take a dim view of significant compensation regardless of the composition.

And, as we typically do, we continue to hope for more action from shareholders against CEOs and boards that are underperforming. We think part of the issue comes from proxy advisors that don’t weigh performance enough in their baseline recommendations and so we see funds with passthrough voting rewarding underperformance.

$25 Million Plus Pay Club Highlights

• The salary component for CEOs in the $25 million pay club only averages ~3%. The packages typically consist of oversized equity components that are meant to appear aligned to shareholder interests, but in many cases are not.
• More than 20 CEOs in the club have delivered negative total shareholder returns over their tenures.
• At the top, CEO pay topped $100 million at 5 companies.
• Companies in the club are paying their CEOs an average of $43 million while median pay came in at $32 million.
• Boardroom Alpha’s CEO ratings for 31 of the CEOs suggest that by-and-large their companies have underperformed peers on key fundamental and market-based measures.
• So far, 67% of 2025 Say-on-Pay votes received less than 90% shareholder support in 2025.
• Only 5 CEOs saw Say-On-Pay support less than 50%: David Simon at Simon Property Group (SPG), David Zaslav at Warner Bros Discover (WBD), Marc Casper at Thermo Fisher Scientific (TMO), Kishore Seendripu at Maxlinear (MXL), and Adam Sullivan at Core Scientific. In the case of Core Scientific, with returns annualized returns of almost 150% in his just under 2-year tenure, we have to wonder what role the proxy advisors played in the low support. We suspect shareholders would likely be quite happy to reward a new CEO with those results. 
• Both Netflix (NFLX) and Lennar (LEN) continue to have Co-CEOs so, you’ll see those companies listed twice below and shareholders will feel double the pain when they see the amount of CEO pay.
• Trump Media & Technology Group CEO, and ex-Congressman from California, Devin Nunes joins the list with a $46.9M pay package despite reporting revenues of less than $1M in the first quarter of 2025.
• Axon Enterprise (AXON) CEO Patrick Smith tops the list of S&P 500 company CEOs with $164.5M in pay. Despite strong returns, shareholders showed discontent with the package as only 67% supported it at the annual meeting.
• Again this year the companies with the biggest CEO pay all lean heavily on a select set of compensation consultants with Compensia, Semler Brossy, and Frederic W. Cook being the most used when coming up with a rationale for outsized pay.

The List of “$25 Million Plus Pay Club” CEOs for 2025