Starbucks’ CEO, Brian Niccol, made 6,666 times more than his average worker last year, according to a report on the growing gap between top executives and their workers.
The inequality gap between CEOs’ pay and that of their median workers rose in 2024 to 285 to 1 from 268 to 1 in 2023, according to a report released this week by the largest federation of labor unions in the US, the AFL-CIO.
CEO pay rose 7% in 2024 among S&P 500 companies, an increase of $1.24m from 2023.
Niccol, who joined the company in September 2024, received more than $97.8m in total compensation in 2024. The typical Starbucks worker’s pay was less than $15,000.
“The median Starbucks worker would have had to start working for Starbucks in 4643 BC (during the Stone Age!) just to earn what Starbucks’ CEO earned in 2024 alone,” the report stated.
The report notes Trump’s “big, beautiful” reconciliation bill passed this year will hand the average CEO of an S&P 500 company a $489,118 tax cut, 639 times more than the median US worker.
“Corporate CEOs are raking in millions, and now they’ll get another kickback from President Trump’s tax cut gift and anti-worker agenda,” said Fred Redmond, secretary treasurer of the AFL-CIO. “Trump is paying for this handout to CEOs by cutting healthcare, food assistance and hundreds of thousands of jobs that depend on government investments.”
An analysis by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found the top 1% of US families, by income, will collectively receive a tax cut of $1.02tn over the next decade as a result of the reconciliation bill.
Donald Trump first ran for president criticizing exorbitant CEO pay, claiming he was going to raise taxes on them.
“You see these guys making these enormous amounts of money, and it’s a total and complete joke,” Trump said in 2015 during an interview during his first presidential campaign. “They pay very little tax, and that’s going to end when I come out with my plan in about three weeks, could be sooner than that … We’re going to be reducing taxes for the middle class. But for the hedge fund guys, they’re going to be paying up.”
In the wake of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, corporations saw their tax rates fall from an average of 22% to 12.8% after the law went into effect.
Under his first presidential term, average CEO pay rose from $13.1m in December 2016 to $15.5m in December 2020. Corporate income tax collections dropped in the wake of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts by $93bn in 2018.
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