Comcast CEO’s salary is 33 times the average Philadelphian’s pay
The average salary for a Philadelphian in 2021 was $75,205.
Comcast’s Brian L. Roberts is the best-paid CEO in the region.
Last year, he received a compensation package of $32.1 million, according to an Axios analysis of financial disclosure documents from 12 of the region’s largest publicly traded companies.
In comparison, the compensation package for Aramark’s CEO was worth $13.3 million. Campbell Soup’s CEO had a compensation package worth $10.3 million in 2022.
The average salary for a Philadelphian in 2021 was $75,205, according to data from Bureau of Labor Statistics, the latest year for which data was available. Roberts salary, which is part of his compensation package, was $2.5 million — 33 times what the average Philadelphian made in 2021.
Although the Comcast CEO’s salary seems staggeringly high in the poorest big city in the country, Roberts earned about $2 million less last year than he made in 2021.
CEOs at S&P 500 companies across the country experienced the smallest percentage increase in their compensation packages since 2015, according to a new study from the Associated Press and Equilar, a company that tracks corporate leadership data.
Companies rewarded their CEOs for steering them through the pandemic, said Amit Batish, director of content and communications at Equilar. However, 2022 was a challenging year for companies, with supply chain issues and inflation.
While $32 million in CEO compensation topped the Philly region, Sundar Pichai of Alphabet, the parent company of Google, received a compensation package of $226 million in 2022, ranking him as the top paid CEO in the country for S&P 500 companies, according to Equilar’s study.
The median Comcast employee salary was $83,399 a year in 2022, while employees at other companies that have high-earning CEOS in the region didn’t make as much, according to an analysis of employee earnings by the Philadelphia Business Journal. The median salary for someone working at Burlington, the New Jersey company, for example was $12,427, and $15,000 at Aramark.
Comparing CEO salaries to employee salaries can be misleading, though.
“It’s kind of hard to compare the two,” said Batish. “It’s a hard story to tell.”
While employees get paid a salary, and maybe a bonus, a large part of CEO compensation is tied to the value of the company stock. That means, when the company does well, they make more money.
Last year was a tough one for the stock market. Stocks and bond prices fell, and by the end of the year the S&P 500 had lost 19%, according to the Wall Street Journal. It was the worst year since 2008 for the Dow, NASDAQ, and S&P 500, as inflation persisted and Russia’s war in Ukraine shook up energy markets.
This story has been updated to make a clearer comparison between the salary of Comcast CEO Brian Roberts and the average salary for Philadelphians.