Boards can say a pay package is performance-based and still make the CEO richer while shareholder returns go negative. In the 10 biggest verified pay-up, stock-down cases from FY2023 to FY2024, the added pay totaled $140.2 million. About 99.3% of that came from stock and option awards.
That is the part worth remembering. When boards decided to raise pay in a negative-return year, the extra money usually did not come from salary or bonus. It came from equity, which is easier to defend rhetorically and easier to hide in a larger compensation table.
- Verified cases
- 38 companies
- Top-10 increase
- $140.2M
- Equity share
- 99.3%
- Cash signal
- -$527K
Same-CEO FY2023 to FY2024 comparisons with pay up and one-year TSR down.
Combined reported-pay increase across the ten largest cases.
Nearly all of the extra money came from stock and option awards.
Average salary-and-bonus change across the top 10 was actually negative.
The biggest equity-driven raises
Shantanu Narayen
A huge stock-award reset made Adobe the largest verified case in this sample.
- Pay increase
- $35.7M
- Equity-driven
- $32.9M
- 1Y TSR
- -15.8%
Jennifer C. Witz
The clearest pay-up, stock-down case in the current verified sample.
- Pay increase
- $29.9M
- Equity-driven
- $32.7M
- 1Y TSR
- -56.9%
Dara Khosrowshahi
Cash did not move; equity did the work.
- Pay increase
- $15.2M
- Equity-driven
- $14.7M
- 1Y TSR
- -2.0%
Marc Casper
New option awards did most of the lifting.
- Pay increase
- $11.5M
- Equity-driven
- $8.8M
- 1Y TSR
- -1.7%
Hassane El-Khoury
Equity more than explains the full increase.
- Pay increase
- $11.2M
- Equity-driven
- $12.2M
- 1Y TSR
- -24.5%
Jacob Thaysen
Fresh grants overwhelmed a brutal one-year TSR decline.
- Pay increase
- $10.1M
- Equity-driven
- $8.4M
- 1Y TSR
- -31.2%
Anthony Wood
Options more than offset a smaller stock-award line.
- Pay increase
- $7.5M
- Equity-driven
- $7.6M
- 1Y TSR
- -18.9%
Charles H. Robbins
A richer stock grant outweighed weaker incentive and other-pay lines.
- Pay increase
- $7.4M
- Equity-driven
- $11.3M
- 1Y TSR
- -5.1%
Yamini Rangan
The grant mix shifted, but equity still drove the increase.
- Pay increase
- $6.3M
- Equity-driven
- $5.3M
- 1Y TSR
- -51.9%
Robert I. Blum
Another case where a larger equity package overwhelmed small cash changes.
- Pay increase
- $5.6M
- Equity-driven
- $5.4M
- 1Y TSR
- -43.7%
The wider 38-company sample includes a few exceptions where incentive cash or other line items mattered more. But among the biggest verified cases, the pattern is the same: compensation committees leaned on stock awards and option awards when they wanted a larger package without making the cash line look outrageous.
Why equity keeps doing the work
Proxy tables record equity at grant-date fair value. That means a board can approve a richer stock package in a year with a negative one-year shareholder return and still present the result as a normal compensation decision. The accounting is technically correct, but the optics are awful: shareholders see a negative return while the grant line moves up.
This is exactly why the stock-award line matters more than the salary line when you compare pay decisions against shareholder returns. Cash changes are visible and politically harder to defend. Equity changes can be larger, quieter, and easier to frame as long-term alignment even when the latest one-year return is negative.
What to check before you call it misalignment
- Start with the year-over-year total. If pay is up and the shareholder return is negative, keep digging.
- Then isolate stock and option awards. In most of these cases, that is where the raise sits.
- Keep the same CEO across both years. CEO transitions can make a perfectly ordinary signing package look like a governance failure. In our warehouse query, that means identifying the current CEO from the role title and then requiring the same executive ID in both fiscal years.
Method note
This analysis expands our original Voronoi chart. We use rentseek.ing data for same-CEO FY2023-to-FY2024 comparisons, keep only compensation rows that passed our CEO-quality checks, identify the current CEO from each year's role title while excluding rows labeled former or prior CEO, and then require the same executive ID in both fiscal years. We annualize the SEC pay-versus-performance TSR series from the proxy filing's $100-indexed values and rank companies by the dollar increase in reported CEO pay. The ranked list above reflects the top 10 current cases, while the wider sample contains 38 companies. The return figures are one-year proxy TSR returns, not calendar-year warehouse price moves.
For the broader pay-versus-performance ranking, see Worst-Aligned CEOs.