Michael Hiltzik: While workers struggled during the pandemic, CEO pay went up, up, up
If the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and the lyricists Gus Kahn and Raymond B. Egan could come back from the grave, they might seek out and thank Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav for validating their line about how "the rich get rich and the poor get poorer."
That's because Zaslav just scurried to the top of the list of America's most overpaid chief executives published annually by the consumer advocacy group As You Sow.
In 2021, when the total shareholder return of Zaslav's company (then known as Discovery) declined by 22%, Zaslav's compensation rocketed up to $246.6 million from $37.7 million the year before, a gain of 554%.
The ratio of Zaslav's pay to that of the median Discovery employee was 2,972 to 1; the average among the Standard & Poor's 500 companies was 324 to 1 — still excessive, but not a patch on Zaslav's achievement.
Total shareholder return mostly encompasses share price changes and dividends.
(By the way, Shelley observed that "the rich have become richer and the poor have become poorer" in his 1821 essay "A
