Live Nation Entertainment Inc. CEO Michael Rapino earned a total compensation package worth $139.0 million in 2022, or 5,414x the company's median employee pay.
The combination of a hefty CEO stock award package and a large number of part-time and seasonal employees in its workforce resulted in Live Nation reporting the biggest CEO-to-median employee pay ratio among its large media and telecom peers.
Rapino's 2022 compensation was boosted by $116.7 million in stock awards tied in part to the executive's five-year employment agreement renewal. That compares to annual total compensation of $25,673 for the median employee at Live Nation in 2022. A significant portion of Live Nation's employees work part-time, seasonally, or only at key venues and festivals. By nature of their limited hours, these employees have "relatively low total compensation," the company said.
If Live Nation considered only its full-time salaried employees and excluded Rapino's one-time stock awards associated with his employee agreement, the company's CEO-to-median employee pay ratio would be 353-to-1.
The median pay ratio for the top 20 US media and telecom companies by market capitalization as of the end of 2022 was 235-to-1, according to an analysis by S&P Global Market Intelligence.
Among other large media and telecom players, Pinterest Inc. had the second-highest pay ratio at 999-to-1, while Alphabet Inc. had the third-highest at 808-to-1.
Pinterest CEO Bill Ready's total compensation package of $122.7 million was boosted by option awards valued at $100.8 million, tied with his appointment as CEO in June 2022. Prior to his appointment at Pinterest, Ready was president of commerce, payments and next billion users at Alphabet's Google.
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai's total compensation package of $226.0 million was inflated by a triennial stock grant valued at about $218.0 million. Pichai ranked as the highest-paid CEO among S&P 500 chief executives, according to Market Intelligence data.
In terms of the largest US media and telecom companies with the smallest pay ratio, two gaming companies — Activision Blizzard Inc. and Take-Two Interactive Software Inc. — each reported a CEO-to-median employee pay ratio of less than 2-to-1.
Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick asked the board to reduce his total compensation to the lowest amount permitted under California law In the wake of a harassment scandal in 2021. As a result, Kotick's total compensation for 2022 was $178,882.
As for Take-Two, CEO Strauss Zelnick and company president Karl Slatoff are both paid through their management company, ZMC. In its proxy, Take-Two explained that Zelnick's reported annual compensation of $115,015 does not include the ZMC payments, which were as high as $43.5 million. Including those, Take-Two's pay ratio was actually 578-to-1.
Turning to the company with the highest median employee salary in the analysis, Meta Platforms Inc. topped the list at $296,320. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg received a salary of just $1, though his total compensation came to $27.1 million, including $14.8 million on personal security.
