How Bryce Harper's $330 million compares to the biggest CEO paydays

By Jena McGregor

Washington Post·

3 Mar, 2019 01:00 AM5 mins to read

John Middleton, Philadelphia Phillies managing parter, shakes hands with Bryce Harper as general manager Matt Klentak looks on. Photo: Getty Images.

Baseball star Bryce Harper scored a historic 13-year, $330 million contract with the Philadelphia Phillies on Thursday, a deal The Post called "the largest contract in the history of major North American sports." But while the deal may shatter records for major league athletes, there are two dozen heavy hitters who've received more compensation over a similar or even shorter period: CEOs.

Equilar, the executive compensation research and consulting firm, ran the numbers on how many current or recently exited CEOs in the S&P 500 have logged more than $330 million in what they call "total realized compensation" over the past 13 years. Their results found not one - or two, or even 10 - but 24 chief executives who've rung up bigger potential paydays. The list includes many founders and long-serving CEOs, from Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg to Netflix's Reed Hastings and The Walt Disney Company's Bob Iger.

Such a comparison requires plenty of important caveats, of course, and is only intended as an interesting snapshot that offers some perspective on highly paid figures. Equilar's analysis looked at the sum of CEOs' base salary, bonus, the value of stock awards that have vested, the value of options that have been exercised and "all other" compensation, such as private aircraft expenses or personal security costs.

But it does not include compensation the CEOs received in prior roles within the company during that 13 years - such as time they spent as operating chief or running the company's finances - only their "realized" compensation as CEO, as calculated by Equilar. That includes the value of exercised stock options or vested stock awards, but the CEO has not necessarily yet sold those shares, which could lead to an actual payday that's much higher or much lower.

Meanwhile, for many of the CEOs on the list below, their 2018 compensation was not included because their companies have not yet released last year's proxy. (Equilar's analysis looked at the latest fiscal year for which S&P 500 companies have disclosed the numbers, which may have been 2017, so a few of the chief executives, including Leslie Moonves at CBS, Kenneth Chenault at American Express, and Brian Jellison at Roper Technologies are no longer CEO.) As a result, for many of these CEOs, their ultimate total payday from the companies on this list could end up at millions less or millions more.

There are some implicit similarities between executive compensation and professional athletes' paydays - both generate value for their owners, whether in the form of higher stock values or more tickets or paraphernalia sold, for instance.

But the risk of the money at stake, and the potential scale of wealth or jobs created by CEOs, notes Stanford Graduate School of Business professor David Larcker, is completely different. So are the jobs, obviously: A CEO builds his own team of people and most star athletes do not, for instance, meaning they have the potential to have much more of an impact.

"I find it interesting, but you've got to take the comparison with a grain of salt," Larcker said. "They're very different markets for people doing very different things. The utility you're getting is not whether the value of your portfolio went up, but whether you had fun at the ballgame."

Still, he acknowledges that there's plenty of debate over how much a CEO really influences a company's stock rise - factors like an innovative new product developed by a predecessor, a good economy or strong industry market conditions could have an outsize effect. And adding some perspective about CEO pay at a time when the public is taking notice of a highly paid athlete could also help educate people about what CEOs really have the opportunity to earn.

After all, many people are clueless about how much the highest-paid CEOs have the potential to make - especially over a multiyear period. A survey of 1,200 people Larcker worked on in 2016 found that many Americans vastly underestimated CEO pay. The median respondent guessed the largest 500 corporate CEOs make about $1 million a year. The real median value of reported compensation that year? $10.3 million.

Company name; CEO; Years of data; Total realized compensation

Facebook; Mark Zuckerberg; 7; $5,600,752,735