As Americans contend with a protracted cost-of-living crisis, CEOs like Walmart's Doug McMillon are raking in unprecedented sums, according to Fortune.
In the United States and abroad, costs for basic, non-negotiable living expenses — including groceries, housing, and energy — have been volatile and rising for the past half-decade.
While Americans choose between food and rent or electricity and prescriptions, Walmart's CEO brings home enough cash to "snatch up a home in less than one workweek," the outlet noted.
The issue of "CEO pay" versus compensation rates for the average worker is not new; in 2014, the Economic Policy Institute warned that as the economy recovered from the 2008 crash, executive compensation "boomed" while worker incomes "declined over the recovery."
In 2014, the EPI observed a "295.9-to-1" ratio of CEO pay to worker pay, a rate that stayed mostly steady at 285-to-1 in 2024, according to the AFL-CIO.
In November, Business Insider estimated the average Walmart worker's yearly salary at a paltry $29,469. The outlet observed that McMillon's compensation as Walmart CEO was more than triple the 295-to-1 ratio in 2014.
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"CEO Doug McMillon was the second-highest-paid CEO in this list with a compensation package worth $27.4 million — a pay ratio of 930:1," Business Insider said. Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich (@RBReich) has frequently highlighted the problem on social media.
"If worker pay grew at the same pace as CEO pay, today's typical worker would make a staggering $431.80 per HOUR," Reich wrote in the caption of a Nov. 9 Instagram post.
As Fortune pointed out, Tesla CEO Elon Musk was ultimately awarded a staggering pay package in November, valued at nearly $1 trillion and drawing a rebuke from Pope Leo.
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Definitely 👍 Income inequality has taken a toll on workers over the past few decades, but wages aren't the only way the problem adversely impacts the general public.
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According to Oxfam, the ultra-wealthy's private jets and yachts generate pollution at rates that the average person can't emit in their entire lifetime.
Fortune commenters were horrified by Walmart CEO Doug McMillon's compensation package, with one person noting that much of this largesse is indirectly funded by taxpayers.
"When companies pay wages that are too low to live on, many workers qualify for government aid like food stamps, housing assistance, or Medicaid," they replied.
"Walmart invented that business model. Lots of part timers, workers working off the clock, and keeping as many full-timers as close to the minimum of hours to still be considered full time," another replied.
"Privatizing the profits, and Socializing the losses. That's late stage capitalism, and as long as we have unlimited money entering politics, we are not going to see regulation of the robber baron class," a third lamented.
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