The CEOs of Nvidia and Lucid each earned hundreds of millions of dollars more than the leaders of other publicly traded U.S.-based automotive companies in 2022, according to this year’s Automotive News/Equilar CEO Compensation Survey.
Overall, however, the study found that CEO compensation declined slightly from 2021.
Nvidia, which makes computer chips, gave Jensen Huang $506.3 million worth of pay and benefits, while Peter Rawlinson got $379 million from Lucid, an electric vehicle maker that went public in 2021.
Rawlinson’s compensation was 11 times more than the next highest-paid CEO, Mary Barra of General Motors.
Huang’s compensation, which included a salary of roughly $1 million and $442.8 million in stock option gains, fell almost 10 percent from 2021. Nvidia declined to comment.
The median CEO compensation in 2022 was $12.4 million, down 3.9 percent from the median on last year’s list. That’s mostly because of smaller bonuses paid in 2022, said Courtney Yu, Equilar’s director of research.
In 2021 “a lot of companies were hitting their annual goals for their bonuses, and that led to larger payouts,” Yu said. “In 2022, there was a lot more economic turmoil, fears of recession and uncertainty. So the bonuses saw a decrease in 2022, which was a big contributing factor to the decrease overall.”
The relatively small sample size of the survey makes it susceptible to swings that could skew results, Yu added.
Each of the top four — Huang, Rawlinson, Barra and Illinois Tool Works CEO Ernest Santi — moved up one spot from the 2022 study. The previous No. 1, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, dropped to the bottom because he earned nothing last year using Equilar’s methodology. After getting $23.5 billion from stock options in 2021, Musk didn’t exercise stock options in 2022 and does not receive a salary.
Barra’s compensation of $34.1 million was down 45 percent. Her salary was unchanged at $2.1 million, but she didn’t exercise any options in 2022 after gaining $26.5 million in options the previous year.
Ford Motor Co. CEO Jim Farley was No. 14 with total compensation of $18.3 million in 2022, 84 percent more than last year. His base salary of $1.7 million was unchanged, but stock awards more than tripled to $10.6 million.
Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares, whose company-reported compensation was worth about $26 million, is not included in the study because the automaker is based overseas.
The study looked at the CEOs of 49 automakers, suppliers and public retailers and calculated total compensation as the sum of base salary, gains from stock option exercise, gains from the vesting of stock awards, cash bonus payouts and other forms of compensation.
Equilar’s survey includes the realized value of equity awards, which is why its numbers can differ from the total compensation reported in regulatory filings.
CEO compensation among the Detroit 3 is a point of contention in their contract negotiations with the UAW. Union President Shawn Fain has used executive compensation figures to justify the UAW’s demands for significantly higher pay and benefits.
Four Ford and four GM executives below the CEOs also were included in the survey. Ford Executive Chair Bill Ford was the highest-paid non-CEO listed, at $17.7 million, followed by GM President Mark Reuss, at $12.8 million. Ford CFO John Lawler received nearly $7.2 million.
Changes in CEO compensation across industry segments were fairly mixed, and there were few trends for any individual segment, Yu said.
“A couple of years ago, we saw large increases because we were coming out of the pandemic and things were only going upward,” he added. “But now that we are in this tougher economic environment, we are seeing a lot less change year over year.”
The eight publicly traded dealership groups on the list were hit hardest by annual bonus decreases in 2022. Median bonuses for CEOs at dealership companies fell 23 percent in 2022 compared with 2021, possibly as a result of supply chain issues that impacted car sales throughout the year, Yu said.
Three new companies were included in this year’s analysis: automaker Fisker, supplier Flex and mobility and technology company Qualcomm.
