It seems appropriate that the highest paid CEO in South Florida runs a company making air conditioners.
Carrier Global CEO David Gitlin received $65 million in total compensation last year, making him the highest paid chief executive officer among publicly traded companies headquartered in Florida. Carrier is based in Palm Beach Gardens and makes air conditioners, furnaces and refrigeration units. Gitlin’s pay package includes his base paycheck, stock awards, stock options and other financial incentives.
Public company CEO pay hit another record overall last year. Median pay for the top executive at S&P 500 firms rose 5.6% to $16.6 million, according to filings through early June examined by executive pay data firm C-Suite Comp.
“It is kind of remarkable,” said David Ikenberry, advisor to C-Suite Comp and finance professor at the University of Colorado. “ Not only are the pay levels kind of high, but the rate of changes in this particular year is pretty high, too,” he said.
WLRN had C-Suite Comp analyze CEO pay data for Florida-based public firms. The compensation figures are included in annual proxy statements for investors that public companies file with the Securities and Exchange Commission. C-Suite Comp compiled the data.
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Gitlin’s total pay topped the list. He’s been Carrier’s CEO since 2019. The total return for Carrier Global shareholders in 2024 was 20.3% including dividends. That outperformed the SPDR Industrials exchange traded fund, in which Carrier is one of the components.
The second highest paid Florida-based CEO was former California U.S. Representative Devin Nunes. He is the CEO of Trump Media, the owner of Truth Social. It is based in Sarasota. Pres. Donald Trump is the majority owner of Trump Media. He transferred his stock to a trust controlled by his son, Donald Trump Jr a month before being sworn in as president.
Nunes’ compensation totaled $47 million last year. More than 90% of it was made up of stock awards.
Trump Media was not profitable last year, but the stock benefited from its namesake’s successful re-election campaign. Shares, which trade under the ticker symbol matching the president’s initials, doubled in price in 2024.
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CEO pay packages
It is uncommon for a CEO of a publicly traded company to receive a regular paycheck of more than $1 million. IRS rules limit the corporate deductibility of CEO pay to that level. Instead of fatter standard paychecks, chief executives are mostly paid through a variety of other means, many of which involve company stock. The general strategy is to tie large pay packages to the performance of the business.
“ The way these executives are paid are quite different from how you and I are paid,” Ikenberry said.
C-Suite Comp finds almost all S&P 500 companies include a performance-based stock incentive program in CEO pay packages. Fifteen years ago it was only about half. Public company boards of directors have shied away from stock option grants in recent years. Ikenberry describes executive stock options “kinda like a lottery ticket. It's either worth something, maybe a lot of something, or it's worth nothing at all.” He credited companies trying to reduce incentives for CEOs to take big risks in hopes that a stock would rocket higher in the short-term and make their options extremely valuable.
“There's still a very strong incentive play,” he said, “and it's very much the case that CEOs will be rewarded handsomely, but the swing-for-the-fences attitude is out of the compensation structure.”
Instead, C-Suite Comp Founder Tanvir Hossain found firms are increasingly awarding restricted stock units, which are not actual shares in the company but a pledge of stock or pay sometime in the future.
Among Florida-based companies tracked by the firm, only one in five used stock options as part of the compensation for CEOs last year. Four included restricted stock units. The most popular incentive pay was outright stock awards. Some firms may require a vesting period for a CEO to realize all the shares awarded in their pay package.
South Florida CEOs
The largest pay packages for chief executives of public companies based in South Florida include a national homebuilder, an online pet store and cruise line bosses.
"The whole idea is that companies were going to be shamed into doing the right thing. It never happened."C-Suite Comp Advisor David Ikenberry
Homebuilder Lennar CEO Stuart Miller was the second highest paid regional CEO in 2024 with a total compensation of almost $30 million. Investors in Lennar stock lost money over the course of the year. The total shareholder return was negative 7.4%,, marking a clear difference from the stocks of other homebuilders. An exchange traded fund that includes Lennar and stocks of three dozen other companies involved in the home building industry was up 13% over the same time period.
Pet e-tailer Chewy paid CEO Sumit Singh $29 million, most of it in stock awards. Chewy shares did very well in 2024, generating a total shareholder return of 42%.
South Florida is the world headquarters of the cruise industry with the three largest U.S. based operators calling Miami-Dade County home. The stocks of Carnival, Royal Caribbean and Norwegian Cruise Line all rallied in 2024 as cruise ships filled with passengers and the companies continued working to pay down massive debts incurred when they were banned from operating during the COVID-19 pandemic.Carnival Corp. CEO Josh Weinstein was paid $23.6 million. Jason Liberty, CEO of Royal Caribbean made $19.5 million. And the total compensation for Norwegian boss Harry Sommer was $12.8 million. The bulk of all their pay was a combination of stock awards and what the researchers called “non-equity incentives.”
This category of pay is a cash bonus tied to specific performance goals. Those goals may include revenue or profit targets, market share, and employee and customer satisfaction.
The largest publicly traded company in Florida by market capitalization, NextEra Energy, paid CEO John Ketchum $21.6 million. NextEra Energy is the parent company of FPL. NextEra’s stock and dividends returned 21.5% to shareholders last year, slightly less than the total return from the SPDR utility exchange traded fund.
CEO and worker pay
In 2017, the Securities and Exchange Commission voted to require publicly traded companies to compare their CEO’s pay to the median pay of employees. The mandate has its roots in the main legislative response to the Great Recession – the Dodd-Frank law. The stated objective was to provide investors with more transparency of the pay of top executives.
“The whole idea is that companies were going to be shamed into doing the right thing,” said Ikenberry. “It never happened,” he said. Investors have not shown much interest in using the pay ratio to make investment decisions or demand governance changes.
The largest difference between CEO pay and median employee pay in Florida is at air conditioning manufacturer Carrier Global. CEO David Gitlin’s $65 million compensation package last year is 1,289 times the median pay of a Carrier Global employee. In its annual proxy statement, the company also offers an alternative comparison. “If the significant one-time impact of the CEO’s Supplemental Award were removed from the calculations,” the company writes, “the total annual compensation value for Mr. Gitlin would have been $16,768,860 and the resulting ratio would have been 329:1.”
The second highest disparity between CEO and median employee pay among South Florida firms was Chewy, where the ratio was 673-to-1. The company also offers what it called a “supplemental CEO pay ratio.” That secondary comparison removes almost $24 million in incentive pay from CEO Sumit Singh’s compensation. The result is narrowing the gap between CEO pay and median employee pay to 125-to-1.
Often judging whether a CEO’s pay is excessive or not is in the eye of the beholder. The pool of people to run complex publicly traded companies is small compared to more ordinary jobs.
“It's easy to say, ‘Gosh, these CEOs are just paid too much,’” Ikenberry said. “But if we think about the kind of value that these CEOs are able to generate and the capability they have, they may not be that common.”
Hossein noted it is difficult to find a common measuring stick to make conclusions about a CEO’s worth, except by looking at other CEOs. “What my house is worth is strongly determined by the houses in my neighborhood. It's very similar in the CEO space. It's a heterogeneous labor market, whereas the rest of us rank-and-file workers are homogeneous in terms of pay,” he said.
The cruise lines had some of the highest CEO-to-median employee pay comparisons. It was over 1000-to-1 for both Carnival Corp. and Royal Caribbean. In its annual financial disclosure, Carnival noted most of those considered median employees consist "primary of ship-based employees who work fewer than twelve months of the year."
In Royal Caribbean's explanation, it notes people working on its ships get housing, meals and medical care while at sea. It also said, "Our shipboard employees also generally reside outside of the U.S., where the cost of living may be significantly lower than in the United States."
Among the three cruise operators, Norwegian's median employee pay last year was the highest at $23,312.
