As shown by the ranking of the biggest compensation among industry CEOs, Morgan Stanley’s James Gorman unseated JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon as the most generously paid head executive in the industry in 2022. The loss last year of a “one-time special award” of $56 million that Dimon received in 2021 resulted in him sustaining the biggest hit to his paycheck among the group.
“If the CEO is adding a lot of shareholder value through decisions that he or she is making that result in a high return to shareholders, then boards are going to want to make sure that they are rewarding that individual appropriately to make sure that there's an alignment,” said Ed Steinhoff, a managing director at executive compensation consultancy Pearl Meyer.
“I think we're going to see a lot of cases where we get to the end of the year and performance is going to be lower than what we expected,” Steinhoff said, noting that stock units comprise a significant portion of CEO compensation. “The value of that stock has declined. The value is not going to be anywhere near what the intended value was at the beginning of the year.”