A windfall for top CEOs in Trump era

[mahatmakanejeeves]

That's the print edition title. Online:

The CEOs of Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan are worth $261 million more since the election

By Jena McGregor February 22

CEOs at the country's largest publicly traded companies may not have been big supporters of Donald Trump during his campaign. But in the three months since the election, many are surely happy to see that the value of their personal holdings of company stock has grown -- and substantially so, in some cases.

According to a newly released analysis by Equilar, the executive pay and board data firm, the total stock ownership value held by Dow 30 CEOs in their companies rose nearly $402 million between Election Day and Feb. 10, the week ending the first three-month period since Trump's win. In total, Dow 30 CEOs held $2.2 billion in company stock as of Nov. 7, which grew to $2.5 billion on Jan. 20 and nearly $2.6 billion by Feb. 10, an 18.4 percent rise.



With the Dow Jones industrial average on a tear in recent months, crossing the arbitrary but mythical 20,000 milestone, it should come as little surprise that CEOs' bulging portfolios have done well, too. One analysis found that the stock market run since Trump's inauguration is the fifth-best market gain for a president's first 30 days in office, coming in behind the first month of Franklin D. Roosevelt's fourth election in 1945.

Still, it is striking to see how much value some CEO portfolios have gained in such a short time. In particular, gains in the holdings of two chief executives -- Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs and Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase -- accounted for nearly two-thirds of the total $402 million gain. According to Equilar, Blankfein's nearly 2.4 million shares grew $146 million in the three months following the election, while Dimon's massive holdings -- he owns more than 6.7 million shares in the bank -- grew by $115.5 million. (The calculation includes shares held outright by the CEOs, not options or restricted stock grants they have been awarded but don't yet have control over.)
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Jena McGregor writes a daily column analyzing leadership in the news for the Washington Post’s On Leadership section. Follow @jenamcgregor
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[RowdieTurtle]

1. And its only getting worse

The pay gap between chief executives of major U.S. firms and their median workers is massive, according to a recent report from career review site Glassdoor, which looked at data from 2014. The average pay ratio of CEO to median worker was 204-to-1, the report found.Aug 27, 2015.

CEO pay in the U.S. has grown exponentially since the 1970s, according to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), rising almost 1,000 percent compared to a rise in worker salaries of roughly 11 percent over the same time period (adjusted for inflation.)