“Typical liberal lying about the facts in that report.”
Total compensation includes the value of salary, bonus, and stock options given to the executive in a year. Stock options have value. If the company gives the CEO the right to buy a million shares of stock at $10.00 per share and the market price is $20 per share, that option has a real value of $10 million dollars ($10 x 1 million shares). Executives become extremely wealthy from stock options if the company performs. He receives the option from the company, it is part of his pay. When he exercises the option he gets a significant benefit. It is real income to him. How can you not count as compensation real economic value the executive receives from the company? If options are worthless as you infer, why would executives accept them?
Note, the value of options in a year does not count the increase in value of stock the executive already owns. It only counts the value of the new options he receives in the current year.
Most of the compensation for senior executives in public companies is realized from options and bonuses, not base salary.
There are but a handful of CEOs that make 353 times average wage but only if you include the current value of the stock and not just what they paid. I’ve seen those report when they were published. They were covered here on FR and disproved to be a fraud. The “average CEO” doees not make “353 times the average employee salary”. Not even close.