Many employees got their companies to buy them a comfy office chair and a computer stand during the Covid-19 work-from-home era. Chief executives of S&P 500 companies did rather better when it comes to improving their working conditions. Among the high-class benefits for the C-suite were enhanced private jet privileges and paid-for mansions, and they have long outlasted the pandemic.
Proxy adviser Glass Lewis recently studied executive pay filings from the last several years and found that perquisite costs — typically a fraction of overall CEO compensation packages — skyrocketed for big US companies. Between 2019 and 2023, annual perk value for bosses went up more than 30 per cent. The absolute charge is typically a few hundred thousand dollars, though for some bosses — such as Salesforce’s Marc Benioff and Palo Alto Networks’ Nikesh Arora — it can reach into the millions.
The simple way to reward executives is with cheques, bonuses and stock options. Instead, companies are increasingly becoming concierges that provide travel, housing, security and even leisure. The more than $20mn that Mark Zuckerberg got from Meta in 2023 for personal and family security is, by leaps and bounds, the single largest perk awarded to any CEO. Zuckerberg currently owns $223bn worth of Facebook stock, so presumably he could stump up for his own rent-a-cops.