Typical employees at major tech companies make more than people in other industries. Take a look at how the top tech companies compare to other industries in the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
Facebook, Google and Netflix pay a higher median salary than Exxon, Goldman Sachs or Verizon
Tech CEOs, on the other hand, don’t make as much in salary as other industries, but they make plenty in stock.
Rani Molla was a senior correspondent at Vox and has been focusing her reporting on the future of work. She has covered business and technology for more than a decade — often in charts — including at Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal.
The median employee salary at Facebook, Alphabet, Netflix and Twitter is higher than at Exxon, Chevron, Goldman Sachs and Verizon, according to data required by the SEC for the first time this year and collected by Equilar, a research firm that tracks data on executives.
The median salary at the approximately 1,600 companies Equilar has measured so far is $63,058.
The median salary at major tech companies is also closer in pay to the CEOs at these companies relative to other industries. CEOs at Facebook, Salesforce, Tesla, Square, Google and Twitter all made less than 40 times the salary of their employees at the median. But across all industries, CEOs made 68 times their company’s median employee salary.
At the same time, it should be noted that tech CEOs take very low salaries since the majority of their compensation comes in company stock.
Jack Dorsey, CEO of both Twitter and Square, made a combined annual salary of two dollars and 75 cents last year. The median salary of his employees was $161,860 and $152,265, respectively, so, obviously, he only makes a fraction of their salary. However, Dorsey has a net worth of nearly $4 billion thanks to his stock.
Alphabet CEO Larry Page made one single dollar in salary last year while his employees made $197,274 in median. Page owns nearly 20 million Class B stock. He’s the ninth-richest man in the world and is worth $51 billion, which averages to an annual compensation of $3.9 billion in the 13 years since the company he founded went public. By that measure, he makes 20,000 times the median pay of his employees.
Apple, Microsoft and Snap weren’t required to report compensation details this year due to the timing of their fiscal years.
Amazon is a notable tech exception. Half the people working at Amazon make less than $28,446. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos makes 59 times that at $1.7 million. At a $131 billion net worth, Bezos is the richest human on the planet, averaging annual compensation of $6.5 billion a year in the 20 years since Amazon debuted on the public markets — that maths out to 230,000 times the median pay of Amazon workers.
In our selection of companies, only McDonald’s had a lower median employee pay than the e-commerce company.
It’s important to note that Amazon employs many seasonal workers — say, to handle the extra packages during Christmas — whose several months’ of pay bring down the median pay for those who work year-round. Amazon employs 563,100 full- and part-time employees but would not say how many temporary or seasonal workers it has. Amazon’s fulfillment center workers in the U.S. make over $15 an hour, including cash, stock and incentive bonuses, before overtime, and receive Amazon’s full suite of health and parental leave benefits, the company says.
Still, its median pay looks nothing like its tech peers.
Use the sortable table below to compare companies’ CEO and median pay:
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
