Earlier we reported [2]that while the US middle class is rapidly going extinct (Piketty excel flub or not, thank you Fed) and that median incomes for everyone but the "1%" have declined since 2009 (and since the 1970s on a real basis), America's executives whose year-end reward is closely tied to the performance of their publicly traded equity and thus to the amount of stock buybacks authorized and executed, have seen their median comp soar by 50% in the past 5 years and in 2013 for the first time cracked the $10 million median pay number. So who are these titans of trickle-up economics? Below is the full list of the Top 100 best paid CEO men and women in the US in 2013.
One thing to note: while Larry Ellison's total comp in 2013 was an impressive $76.9 million, or over a thousand times the average worker's salary, it pales by comparison to David Tepper's $3.5 billion [3]take home, which amounts to about $400,000 per hour which the best paid hedge fund manager made in 2013.
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Source: WSJ [5] [5]