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AI Executive Compensation Statistics: 2026 Report

By Darin ten Bruggencate, Founder, AI Industry Reviews · November 6, 2026

Our analysts read the latest proxy statements for 15 publicly traded AI chip, cloud, and software companies, filed with the SEC through Oct 22, 2026. We took each CEO's salary, stock and option awards, cash incentives, and total pay from the Summary Compensation Table. We also pulled the CEO pay ratio, the prior year's total for the same CEO, and the shareholder return each company reported in its pay-versus-performance table. Revenue came from each company's annual report.

Every publicly traded US company has to report what it pays its chief executive and its other top officers. The figures appear in a Summary Compensation Table in the annual proxy statement filed with the SEC, and that filing also has to compare the CEO's pay with what the company's median employee earns. For companies selling AI chips, cloud capacity, and AI software, those tables now carry some of the largest equity grants on record. Meanwhile, reports of nine-figure offers to individual AI researchers have put a public price on talent at private labs. Those disclosures show how AI pay is set and what it is tied to.

In the following sections, we break down CEO pay levels, the salary and stock mix, CEO pay ratios, year-over-year changes, pay for other top executives, pay against revenue and shareholder return, the largest AI-linked grants, and reported pay at private AI labs.

How Much AI Company CEOs Are Paid

This section ranks total CEO pay at the 15 companies for the latest fiscal year each has reported.

Oracle had two co-CEOs at fiscal year end, so the sample covers 16 executives. For C3.ai we used Stephen Ehikian, the executive the company used for its CEO pay ratio.

CEO total pay at publicly traded AI companies, latest fiscal year

CEO Total Pay at 15 Publicly Traded AI Companies, Latest Fiscal Year

Key Findings

• The median total across the 16 CEOs is $30.6 million. Three were above $100 million, all from equity grants made in a single year: Oracle's two co-CEOs and Broadcom's Hock Tan.
• Equity drives the totals. Stock and option awards made up 93.0% of the $1.42 billion paid to the 16 CEOs combined, and salary made up 1.1%.
• A single year's total depends heavily on when large grants land. For anyone comparing AI CEOs, a multiyear view of the same table gives a fairer picture than one year.

The Salary and Stock Mix in AI CEO Pay

This section breaks each CEO's total into salary, equity awards, cash incentives, and other compensation.

Stock and option awards are counted at their grant-date accounting value, not at what the executive eventually receives. "All other compensation" covers items such as security, aircraft use, and insurance.

Share of CEO total pay from stock and option awards

How AI Company CEO Pay Is Split, by Component

Super Micro is left out because its total was $442.

Key Findings

• At several companies with no new equity awards, security costs make up most of the total. Meta reports about $8.5 million in personal security costs for Mark Zuckerberg plus a $14.0 million pre-tax security allowance, and Alphabet reports $8.8 million in security for Sundar Pichai.
• Other perks can also be large. Palantir's figure for Alexander Karp includes a $2,390,000 filing fee under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act, alongside tax services, insurance, and medical coverage.
• Salaries are close to flat across the group. Only Microsoft and Alphabet paid salaries above $2 million, so the year-to-year swings in AI CEO pay come almost entirely from equity.

CEO Pay Ratio at AI Companies

This section compares each CEO's total pay with the pay of the company's median employee, as each company disclosed it.

Companies choose their own method for identifying the median employee, and newly public companies can skip the ratio. CoreWeave and Tempus AI did not report one.

CEO pay ratio and median employee pay

CEO Pay Ratio at Publicly Traded AI Companies

Log scale. CoreWeave and Tempus AI did not report a ratio.

Key Findings

• The median ratio across the 14 disclosures is 92 to 1. Median employee pay ranges from $40,206 at Amazon to $388,200 at Meta.
• One-time grants move the ratio as much as they move pay. Broadcom also reported a supplemental ratio of 93 to 1, using a $35.0 million total that counts one-fifth of the value of Tan's 2023 performance award in place of the new one.
• For readers comparing ratios across companies, the median employee's pay matters as much as the CEO's. Several AI software and chip companies report median pay above $280,000, which keeps their ratios low even when CEO pay is high.

Year-Over-Year Change in AI CEO Pay

This section compares each CEO's latest total with the same person's total a year earlier.

Twelve of the 16 CEOs held the role or appeared in the table in both years. We left out the two Oracle co-CEOs, Ehikian, and McAleenan, who took their roles during or just before the latest year.

Change in CEO total pay from the prior fiscal year

AI Company CEO Pay, Prior vs Latest Fiscal Year

Log scale.

Key Findings

• Eight of the 12 CEOs were paid more than a year earlier, and the median change was an increase of 22.8%.
• The two largest swings come from grant timing. Broadcom's 2025 award covers Tan's equity for fiscal 2028 through 2030, and Liang's prior-year total was an option award, with no new grant in fiscal 2025.
• Year-over-year changes for CEOs paid mainly in stock say more about the grant calendar than about a raise. Investors reading these tables should check whether a grant is annual or front-loaded before treating a jump as a trend.

Pay for Other Top AI Executives

This section looks at the average pay of the other top executives each company reports alongside its CEO.

The figure is the average Summary Compensation Table total for the non-CEO executives, as each company reports it in its pay-versus-performance table.

Average total pay for other top executives, latest fiscal year

Key Findings

• The median average across the 15 companies is $14.4 million. At Alphabet, Palantir, Amazon, and CoreWeave, the other top executives averaged more than the CEO.
• Oracle's Summary Compensation Table also reports $131.0 million for Larry Ellison, its executive chair and chief technology officer, of which $117.8 million was stock options.
• For investors and boards, other executive pay is a useful second reference. Where the CEO took no new equity, as at Alphabet, Palantir, Amazon, and CoreWeave, it shows what the company is paying senior leaders that year.

AI CEO Pay Against Revenue and Shareholder Return

This section sets each CEO's pay next to the company's revenue growth and one-year shareholder return.

The return is the change in the value of a $100 investment that each company reports in its pay-versus-performance table, over the same fiscal year. CoreWeave has no prior-year value because it went public in March 2025.

CEO pay, revenue growth, and one-year shareholder return

AI Company CEO Pay vs One-Year Shareholder Return

Log scale. CoreWeave, public since March 2025, and Super Micro, with a $442 total, are left out.

Key Findings

• Pay and one-year return do not line up. Two of the three companies with CEO pay above $90 million, Oracle and Microsoft, had negative returns, while Palantir returned 135.0% with CEO pay of $8.6 million.
• Revenue growth was positive at 13 of the 15 companies. The two with falling revenue, C3.ai and BigBear.ai, still paid their CEOs $36.2 million and $6.6 million, mostly in new equity awards.
• Grant-date values are set before results come in, so these tables show what a board expected, not what the executive earned. For shareholders, the realized value of these awards over the next several years is the better measure of whether pay tracked performance.

The Largest AI-Linked Grants

This section covers the single equity awards that pushed AI-linked pay into the hundreds of millions or more in the latest proxy cycle.

We included Tesla here because its board describes the company as moving to "a physical AI company," and the 2025 award's milestones include robots and robotaxis. Tesla is not in the 15-company sample above.

Largest single equity awards to AI-linked CEOs and executives

Key Findings

• Tesla's 2025 Summary Compensation Table reports $158.4 billion for Musk. That is the combined grant-date value of his two 2025 stock awards, not cash paid. With median employee pay of $62,786, Tesla's required ratio is 2,522,203 to 1.
• Broadcom is the clearest case of a grant tied directly to AI sales. Its proxy says Tan earns nothing unless AI Revenue is more than three times the $20 billion of fiscal 2025 AI Revenue forecast when the goals were set.
• Shareholders weighing these grants are looking at maximum or accounting values, not cash. Musk's 2025 award pays out only if Tesla's market value and operating goals are reached, and Tan's pays nothing unless AI Revenue clears $60 billion.

Reported Pay at Private AI Labs

This section collects reported pay for AI researchers and executives at private labs and in Meta's AI hiring. None of these figures comes from an SEC filing.

Private companies do not file proxy statements, so every figure below is reported by the press, often from unnamed sources, and some were disputed. We include only figures from articles we could open directly.

Reported pay for AI researchers and lab staff (reported, not disclosed in filings)

Key Findings

• The reported first-year amounts of up to $100 million would exceed the latest total for 13 of the 16 CEOs in our sample. These packages combine base salary, a signing bonus and stock, with stock the largest part.
• Not every reported offer was as large as the headlines. Researcher Lucas Beyer, who left OpenAI for Meta, wrote "no, we did not get 100M sign-on". WIRED also quotes a senior Meta engineer whose pay was around $850,000 a year.
• For companies competing for AI researchers, the reported packages set expectations even when unconfirmed. Stock-based compensation equals about 46.2% of OpenAI's annual revenue, a cost public AI companies have to compete with.

What AI Executive Pay Figures Mean for Investors and Boards

For investors, the latest proxies show that AI company CEO pay is mostly stock, and that a few large grants decide the averages. Oracle's co-CEO options, Broadcom's front-loaded award and Tesla's $132.3 billion maximum award account for most of the extreme values. Eleven of the 16 CEOs in the sample were paid between $2 million and $60 million.

The links between pay and results are loose in any single year. Several of the highest totals went to CEOs of companies whose shares fell, and Palantir's CEO was paid $8.6 million in a year its shares more than doubled. Boards are setting grant values in advance, and the results show up years later.

Pay at private labs is harder to pin down. The figures are reported rather than filed, and Meta and the researchers involved have disputed some of them. They still show that pay for individual AI researchers can rival or exceed the pay of public company CEOs. So if you are judging an AI executive's pay package, look at what the equity is tied to, how many years it covers and what the median employee earns, not just the headline total.

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