Quartz reports:

It would take more than five career lifetimes for workers to earn what S&P 500 index chief executive officers earn in just one year, according to a new report from the AFL-CIO.

CEOs in the S&P 500 made about $17.7 million on average in 2023, according to the latest edition of the federation of labor unions’s “Paywatch” report. That’s more than 268 times the median worker’s income at those companies, according to the AFL-CIO, which reviewed compensation data for executives at 3,000 companies, including those in the S&P 500.

Over the past decade, the average pay of an S&P 500 CEO has increased by $4.2 million. From 2022 to 2023 alone, compensation for CEOs grew 6%.

For the median employee of any of the companies in the S&P 500, they would need to have started working in 1755 to earn $17.7 million. That would require them to be born not only before the American Revolution and the U.S.’s founding, but in the same year that French Queen Marie Antoinette and future Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton were born. That’s roughly 269 years ago. [Continue reading…]