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Donald Trump earns 25 times as much as the overpaid CEOs he bashes

Rick Newman
·Senior Columnist

One easy way to score points with disenchanted voters is to trash inflated CEO pay. Donald Trump has taken the bait—even though his own paycheck makes other CEOs look like junior salespeople.

Trump has made headlines by saying CEO pay is “a total and complete joke” and claiming CEOs rig the system by appointing buddies to the board that determines their pay. He’s hardly the only one complaining about that. The typical big-company CEO earns nearly $11 million per year, which is roughly 300 times average worker pay of about $36,400. At Macy's — the one company Trump singled out for criticism —CEO Terry Lundgren earned $16.5 million last year.

Trump himself, however, earns at least $270 million per year, according to mandatory financial disclosures the presidential candidate filed with the government in July. As head of the Trump Organization, the Donald outearns Lundgren 16-to-1 and the average CEO 25-to-1. And he earns 7,400 times more than the typical American worker.

Trump’s 92-page disclosure form lists approximately 100 sources of income greater than $10,000 between January 1, 2014 and June 30, 2015. Most of those are subsidiaries of the Trump Organization, Trump’s collection of commercial buildings, hotels, golf courses, condo towers and other properties. Yahoo Finance tallied the income, which in some cases is a range (between $1 million and $5 million, for example). Trump’s minimum income was $405 million. The maximum: $453 million. Since those figures cover 18 months, annualizing them yields minimum yearly pay of $270 million.

Trump’s company is private, so it doesn’t have to report what anybody working there earns. It also has no public shareholders to gripe that management is overpaid.

Trump may not be the highest-paid CEO ever, but he’s close. A few hedge-fund managers have pulled down more than $1 billion per year, although that income in one sense comes from the returns on other people’s money. The highest-paid boss of a public company last year was Charif Souki, CEO of Houston natural-gas firm Chenier Energy, who brought home $142 Million. It’s possible a couple of other private-company CEOs could get paid in Trump’s range. Charles Koch, CEO of Koch Industries, doesn’t report his pay, but Forbes estimates his net worth to be $41 billion—10 times Trump’s $4 billion.

It’s worth keeping in mind that Trump’s huge paychecks during recent years come as the real-estate industry is on a powerful upswing, following a recession that wiped out trillions in real-estate value. So it stands to reason that Trump has had leaner years, including the four times Trump entities have declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy (in 1991, 1992, 2004 and 2009). Maybe that's why he's running for president now, but didn't then.

Rick Newman’s latest book is Liberty for All: A Manifesto for Reclaiming Financial and Political Freedom. Follow him on Twitter: @rickjnewman.

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