Taking Aim at Overpaid CEOs
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/ March 11, 2026
Taking Aim at Overpaid CEOs
Landmark San Francisco and Los Angeles ballot initiatives aim to hike taxes on corporations with huge gaps between CEO and worker pay.
Sarah Anderson
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This article appears in the
April 2026 issue, with the headline “Taking Aim at Overpaid CEOs.”
The espresso machine in Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol’s personal office in Newport Beach, California, retails for $14,000—almost as much as the $14,674 annual wage of the coffee giant’s median worker, a part-time barista.
In other words, nearly half of Starbucks’s 361,000 employees would have to spend every dime they make over an entire year to buy just one of these deluxe caffeine-delivery systems. In 2024, Niccol pocketed $95.8 million in compensation. With that windfall, he could have purchased 6,843 units of his favorite coffee maker—more than enough to luxuriously outfit every single elementary-school teachers’ lounge in the state of California.
So go the absurdities of our ever more unequal world.
Ordinary Americans across the political spectrum have been fuming about the obscene disparities in pay between corporate America’s CEOs and workers ever since those gaps began to soar in the Reagan years. But today, with budget cuts threatening the food and medical aid that so many working families depend on, the corrosive social cost of this exploding inequality has come into particularly sharp relief.
At many of our nation’s largest employers, median salaries have fallen below the $36,777 family-of-three income threshold for Medicaid benefits. Those employers, our research at the Institute for Policy Studies finds, are familiar names to most Americans: Starbucks, Home Depot, Autozone, Chipotle, Target, Walmart, and other corporate giants.
Pay practices at big businesses like these don’t just shaft workers. They allow corporations to shift their employees’ basic living costs onto taxpayers, which means we’re all subsidizing Brian Niccol’s ocean-view lattes—and the corporate jet he uses to commute to the company’s headquarters in Seattle.
Current Issue
April 2026 Issue
All of us are also subsidizing the $47 billion that Lowe’s has spent on stock buybacks over the past six years, an outlay that artificially inflates its CEO’s stock-based pay. And don’t forget those three DoorDash cofounders: They’ve each become billionaires while their “Dashers”—the workers who deliver the food—earn an average of $12.23 an hour.
How can we crack down on all this executive excess? A greater union presence in the United States would certainly help: Countries with higher unionization rates tend to have narrower corporate pay gaps. But decades of …
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Current Issue
Feature
/ March 11, 2026
Taking Aim at Overpaid CEOs
Landmark San Francisco and Los Angeles ballot initiatives aim to hike taxes on corporations with huge gaps between CEO and worker pay.
Sarah Anderson
Share
Copy Link
X (Twitter)
Bluesky Pocket
This article appears in the
April 2026 issue, with the headline “Taking Aim at Overpaid CEOs.”
The espresso machine in Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol’s personal office in Newport Beach, California, retails for $14,000—almost as much as the $14,674 annual wage of the coffee giant’s median worker, a part-time barista.
In other words, nearly half of Starbucks’s 361,000 employees would have to spend every dime they make over an entire year to buy just one of these deluxe caffeine-delivery systems. In 2024, Niccol pocketed $95.8 million in compensation. With that windfall, he could have purchased 6,843 units of his favorite coffee maker—more than enough to luxuriously outfit every single elementary-school teachers’ lounge in the state of California.
So go the absurdities of our ever more unequal world.
Ordinary Americans across the political spectrum have been fuming about the obscene disparities in pay between corporate America’s CEOs and workers ever since those gaps began to soar in the Reagan years. But today, with budget cuts threatening the food and medical aid that so many working families depend on, the corrosive social cost of this exploding inequality has come into particularly sharp relief.
At many of our nation’s largest employers, median salaries have fallen below the $36,777 family-of-three income threshold for Medicaid benefits. Those employers, our research at the Institute for Policy Studies finds, are familiar names to most Americans: Starbucks, Home Depot, Autozone, Chipotle, Target, Walmart, and other corporate giants.
Pay practices at big businesses like these don’t just shaft workers. They allow corporations to shift their employees’ basic living costs onto taxpayers, which means we’re all subsidizing Brian Niccol’s ocean-view lattes—and the corporate jet he uses to commute to the company’s headquarters in Seattle.
Current Issue
April 2026 Issue
All of us are also subsidizing the $47 billion that Lowe’s has spent on stock buybacks over the past six years, an outlay that artificially inflates its CEO’s stock-based pay. And don’t forget those three DoorDash cofounders: They’ve each become billionaires while their “Dashers”—the workers who deliver the food—earn an average of $12.23 an hour.
How can we crack down on all this executive excess? A greater union presence in the United States would certainly help: Countries with higher unionization rates tend to have narrower corporate pay gaps. But decades of …
Taking Aim at Overpaid CEOs
Ask why this angle was chosen.
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Taking Aim at Overpaid CEOs
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Politics
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Economy
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Current Issue
Feature
/ March 11, 2026
Taking Aim at Overpaid CEOs
Landmark San Francisco and Los Angeles ballot initiatives aim to hike taxes on corporations with huge gaps between CEO and worker pay.
Sarah Anderson
Share
Copy Link
Facebook
X (Twitter)
Bluesky Pocket
Email
This article appears in the
April 2026 issue, with the headline “Taking Aim at Overpaid CEOs.”
The espresso machine in Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol’s personal office in Newport Beach, California, retails for $14,000—almost as much as the $14,674 annual wage of the coffee giant’s median worker, a part-time barista.
In other words, nearly half of Starbucks’s 361,000 employees would have to spend every dime they make over an entire year to buy just one of these deluxe caffeine-delivery systems. In 2024, Niccol pocketed $95.8 million in compensation. With that windfall, he could have purchased 6,843 units of his favorite coffee maker—more than enough to luxuriously outfit every single elementary-school teachers’ lounge in the state of California.
So go the absurdities of our ever more unequal world.
Ordinary Americans across the political spectrum have been fuming about the obscene disparities in pay between corporate America’s CEOs and workers ever since those gaps began to soar in the Reagan years. But today, with budget cuts threatening the food and medical aid that so many working families depend on, the corrosive social cost of this exploding inequality has come into particularly sharp relief.
At many of our nation’s largest employers, median salaries have fallen below the $36,777 family-of-three income threshold for Medicaid benefits. Those employers, our research at the Institute for Policy Studies finds, are familiar names to most Americans: Starbucks, Home Depot, Autozone, Chipotle, Target, Walmart, and other corporate giants.
Pay practices at big businesses like these don’t just shaft workers. They allow corporations to shift their employees’ basic living costs onto taxpayers, which means we’re all subsidizing Brian Niccol’s ocean-view lattes—and the corporate jet he uses to commute to the company’s headquarters in Seattle.
Current Issue
April 2026 Issue
All of us are also subsidizing the $47 billion that Lowe’s has spent on stock buybacks over the past six years, an outlay that artificially inflates its CEO’s stock-based pay. And don’t forget those three DoorDash cofounders: They’ve each become billionaires while their “Dashers”—the workers who deliver the food—earn an average of $12.23 an hour.
How can we crack down on all this executive excess? A greater union presence in the United States would certainly help: Countries with higher unionization rates tend to have narrower corporate pay gaps. But decades of …
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