25 Highest Paid CEOs – 2024 & Their College Degrees
July 25, 2024
Highest Paid CEOs 2024 – I am not against CEOs being compensated for their job performance. I feel like that little disclaimer was necessary because as I discuss the highest-paid CEOs over the coming paragraphs, you might notice a somewhat sardonic—maybe even condemnatory—tone. Like, for example, when I say that the salaries of the highest-paid CEOs stretch the limits of credulity. Because while the highest-paid CEOs are often brilliant and remarkable people in their own ways, their salaries, when contrasted with what average workers make in a given year, are absurd.
Studies show that CEOs make 344 times the average yearly salary of nonsupervisory workers. One report found that CEOs were paid 399 times as much as a typical worker, a 1460% increase since 1978. In other words: it hasn’t always been like this. In fact, in 1965, CEOs made a modest 21 times more than the average worker.
But CEOs aren’t the only ones earning exorbitant sums in 2024. MLB and NBA players make oodles of cash—this offseason Shohei Ohtani signed a deal with the Dodgers worth $700 million; Jayson Tatum just re-upped with the Celtics to the tune of $62 million a year—but since I like baseball and basketball, my tone in those articles was more celebratory than it was reproachful. So with the caveat that I might be just a little bit biased, check out a list of the highest-paid CEOs below.
If you are considering a career in business one day, check out our 50 Best Colleges for Finance and 50 Best Colleges for Business.
Highest paid CEOs – 2024
25) Vicente Reynal, Ingersoll Rand – $54.5 million
College degree: Mechanical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology
24) Satya Nadella, Microsoft – $54.9 million
College degree: Electrical Engineering, Manipal Institute of Technology
Highest Paid CEOs 2024 (Continued)
23) Richard Handler, Jefferies Financial Group – $56.9 million
College degree: Economics, University of Rochester
22) Mark Anderson, Alteryx – $57.1 million
College degree: Economics and Business, York University
21) Robert Antokol, Playtika Holding Corp. – $57.2 million
College degree: Practical Engineering, Ort Braude College
Highest CEO Salary – Highest Paid CEOs 2024 (Continued)
20) David Epstein, Seagen – $57.5 million
College degree: Pharmacy, Rutgers University
19) Hock Tan, Broadcom – $60 million
College degree: Mechanical Engineering, MIT
18) Tim Cook, Apple – $63.2 million
College degree: Industrial Engineering, Auburn University
Tim Cook’s 2023 salary of $63.2 million is chump change compared with some of the highest-paid CEOs at the top of this list. But don’t let that trifling sum fool you—he made $98 million in 2021, and $99 million in 2023. And, by the way, his net worth is estimated to be around $2.2 billion.
Cook, who’s been Apple’s chief executive officer since 2011, has received considerable media praise for his commitment to bring Apple to net carbon neutrality by 2030. And rightfully so. At the same time, Apple—during Cook’s tenure as CEO—has been criticized for subjecting their factory workers to brutal conditions for extremely low pay. One report found that workers at an iPhone, iPad, and MacBook factory were making less than $200 a month. Another report alleges that an Apple supplier was using forced Uyghur labor in China.
Highest Paid CEOs 2024 (Continued)
17) Thomas Shannon, Bowlero Corp – $67 million
College degree: International Relations, American University
16) Peter Anevski, Progyny – $68 million
College degree: Accounting and Finance, Wayne State University
15) Peter Zaffino, American International Group – $75 million
College degree: Economics, Boston College
14) Eric Yuan, Zoom – $76 million
College degree: Applied Mathematics, Shandong University of Science and Technology
Eric Yuan, one of the highest-paid CEOs in the world, is the CEO and founder of a little video conferencing system that in 2020, in the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic, became a household name and contributed to keeping—at least in part—the world turning.
Zoom has a cute origin story. Yuan was inspired to create a video conferencing software when he was a student in university; his girlfriend lived 10 hours away by train, and he came up with the idea as a way to be (virtually) closer to her. Yuan moved to Silicon Valley in 1997, where he joined WebEx, and later, Cisco Systems. In 2011, he pitched the Cisco execs on an early version of Zoom, which he marketed as a smartphone-friendly video conferencing app. Cisco turned him down. So he left to start his own company, Zoom Video Communications.
Yuan became a billionaire in 2019, when Zoom went public. The COVID pandemic was another boon: between 2019 and 2020, Yuan’s net worth shot up 360%, to an estimated $16.4 billion.
Highest CEO Salary – Highest Paid CEOs 2024 (Continued)
13) Joseph Bae, KKR & Co – $80 million
College degree: Economics, Harvard
12) Allan Thygesen, DocuSign – $85 million
College degree: Economics, University of Copenhagen
Highest CEO Salary – Highest Paid CEOs 2024 (Continued)
11) Aneel Bhursi, Workday – $102.7 million
College degree: Electrical Engineering, Brown University
10) Kiwi Camara, CS Disco – $109 million
College degree: Computer Science, Hawaii Pacific University
Kiwi Camara made $109 million in 2022 as the CEO of CS Disco, a management software for lawyers. He stepped down the following year amidst allegations of sexual misconduct.
Highest Paid CEOs 2024 (Continued)
9) Bill Ready, Pinterest – $122 million
College degree: Information Science, Louisville
Bill Ready, who in 2022 made $122 million as Pinterest’s chief executive, previously worked at Google, PayPal, Braintree, and McKinsey.
8) Douglas Ingram, Sarepta Therapeutics – $124 million
College degree: Psychology, Arizona State
In 2022, Douglas Ingram made just south of $125 million as Sarepta CEO. Sarepta Therapeutics is a medical research and drug development company that focuses on treating genetic diseases.
Highest CEO Salary – Highest Paid CEOs 2024 (Continued)
7) Michael Rapino, Live Nation Entertainment – $139 million
College degree: Business Administration, Lakehead University
Michael Rapino started his career as a beer rep for Labatt Breweries, promoting bands at local bars. Now he’s a mega-millionaire CEO whose company is being sued by the DOJ on antitrust grounds.
6) Nikesh Arora, Palo Alto Networks – $151 million
College degree: Electric Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology. Varanasi
Nikesh Arora heads Palo Alto Networks, a behemoth cybersecurity company that serves 85 of the Fortune 100. He holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Varanasi, in addition to a master’s degree in finance from Boston College and an MBA from Northeastern.
Highest Paid CEOs 2024 (Continued)
5) Barry McCarthy, Peloton – $168 million
College degree: History, Northwestern
Former Spotify and Netflix exec Barry McCarthy served as the CEO of stationary bike company Peloton from 2022 to 2024. McCarthy replaced founder John Foley as the company’s top dog.
McCarthy’s tenure wasn’t exactly glorious. Only two years after becoming CEO, McCarthy stepped down as the company announced it would be cutting 15% of its staff to make up for lackluster revenue. And that news came after McCarthy himself implemented an earlier round of cuts that saw 500 Peloton employees lose their jobs. But hey—McCarthy got paid. As a matter of fact, in 2022, McCarthy was the highest-paid CEO in the US.
4) Stephen Scherr, Hertz – $182 million
College degree: Arts, Princeton
Stephen Scherr served as the CEO of car rental company Hertz from 2022 to 2024, in which time he became one of the highest-paid CEOs in the country. Prior to joining Hertz, Scherr was an investment banker at Goldman Sachs, and served as their CFO from 2018 to 2021.
Scherr holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Princeton University and a law degree from Harvard Law School.
3) Sundar Pichai, Alphabet Inc – $226 million
College degree: Metallurgical Engineering, IIT Kharagpur
Sundar Pichai has been the CEO of Alphabet Inc., the holding company for Google, since 2015. He joined Google in 2004, and on his way up the corporate ladder, he oversaw the development of apps like Chrome, Drive, Gmail, and Google Maps.
Pichai graduated with a degree in metallurgical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur. He also holds degrees from Stanford and the University of Pennsylvania.
2) Stephen Schwarzman, Blackstone Group – $253 million
College degree: Social Sciences, Yale
Stephen Schwarzman isn’t just one of the highest-paid CEOs. He’s one of the richest people on the planet. In April 2024, Forbes estimated his net worth to be $39 billion. Trying to conceptualize numbers like that makes my brain hurt (this interactive graphic does a great job of putting that kind of wealth in perspective). Here’s how I think about it: the median household income in the US is $68,000. Divide 39 billion by 68,000 and you get a really big number: 573,529. That means that it’d take 573,529 years—earning the median household income in the US—to match the wealth of Stephen Schwarzman.
Lots of interesting things will have happened, geologically and astronomically speaking, in 500,000 or so years. Niagara Falls will have eroded the remaining 32 kilometers to Lake Erie and will no longer exist. New volcanic islands will have formed. And due to the orbit of stars around the Milky Way, the constellations as we recognize them today will have ceased to exist.
Schwarzman heads Blackstone Inc., a massive investment firm that’s got its moneyed tentacles in everything from politics to dating apps to elderly care facilities. Lately, Blackstone has come under (some, not enough) fire for buying up huge amounts of commercial and residential property and renting it out for a profit. In 2019, an advisor to the UN accused the company of contributing to the global housing crisis.
1) Elon Musk, Tesla – $55.8 billion*
College degree: Physics and Economics, University of Pennsylvania
Yes, that’s billion with a b. Musk stands alone on the list of the highest-paid CEOs. The figure is asterisked because he didn’t receive the nearly $56 billion (what’s a couple hundred million here or there?) as his yearly salary. Rather, it was a pay package put in place back in 2018; Tesla shareholders approved the measure in a vote this past June.
Frankly, there are plenty of reasons to be critical of Musk. I won’t enumerate them all here. Instead, I’ll spell out what I think is the most compelling reason to cultivate a heathy mistrust of the South African billionaire. And that is: he doesn’t care about you, or the environment—as much as he’d like you to believe that. The only thing he cares about is his bottom line.
Highest CEO Salary – Highest Paid CEOs 2024 (Continued)
What’s my evidence for that claim? Well, back in 2013, Musk floated a proposal to connect LA and San Francisco via what he called a “hyperloop”—a vacuum-sealed tube that he said would zip travelers up and down the coast in just 35 minutes. Of course, Musk’s plans never materialized. In fact, calling them “plans” is somewhat misleading: according to his biographer, he never even intended to build the thing in the first place. Rather, he teased the idea because he wanted to tank California’s plans to build a high-speed rail system.
And here we are in 2024: Californian cities are crippled by traffic, and the state still doesn’t have a high-speed rail system. Now ask yourself: why would Musk want to kill a public transportation project? After all, public transportation is safe, clean, and democratic. Sadly, it doesn’t take a big imaginative effort to figure that one out: effective public transport means less people buying Teslas. And that means less value for ol’ Elon and his shareholders.
I’ll leave it there. Musk reigns supreme amongst the world’s highest-paid CEOs, and—for better or worse—he’s going to be shaping our reality for years to come.
Highest Paid CEOs & Their College Degrees – Additional Resources
