The Sky’s the Limit for C.E.O. Pay

The annual tallies of chief executive pay for 2023 have arrived and they are fascinating and irritating, in equal measure.

There is already so much evidence that C.E.O.s are earning a ton of money — while most employees are not — that these annual revelations can’t be called shocking news.

But this year, there’s a new wrinkle: Companies must disclose how much C.E.O. stock holdings increase when the market rises. By that measure, too, chief executives are amassing extraordinary wealth.

From any angle, the specifics are eye-popping.

In 2023, using traditional measures of executive pay, four chief executives of publicly traded companies were each rewarded with more than $150 million:

• Jon Winkelried of TPG, a private equity company.

• Harvey Schwartz of the Carlyle Group, also a private equity firm.

• Hock Tan of Broadcom, a semiconductor and data-center giant.

• Nikesh Arora of Palo Alto Networks, a global cybersecurity company.

Plus, new rules stemming from the Dodd-Frank law of 2010 have gone into effect. They focus on how the market changes executive pay each year, yielding a second highest-paid C.E.O. list.

These new numbers — called compensation actually paid (CAP) — are often even bigger than the traditional chief executive payday bonanzas. That’s the case for a man whose outsize pay is already a major issue for his company: Elon Musk of Tesla, who gained $1.4 billion in 2023 — more than any other C.E.O.

But that stunning figure is only theoretical and based largely on stock that Mr. Musk no longer has a legal claim to. The holdings reflect an earlier $46.5 billion pay package that a judge in Delaware has voided, and that Mr. Musk is fighting to reclaim. Tesla shareholders are set to vote on Mr. Musk’s pay on June 13, and court battles are likely to continue for a long while.