David A. Ricks has been with Eli Lilly, the US pharmaceutical company, for 25 years in departments including marketing, sales, drug development and operations. However, he ascended to CEO in 2017. The market cap of Eli Lilly is $578.3 billion and that has generously trickled down to its top executive.
Warren Buffett, the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, a holding company that owns many other companies (including Geico, Duracell and Dairy Queen to name a few) is worth $114 billion. That’s Buffett himself, not the company. Berkshire Hathaway has a market cap of $749.08 billion.
Elon Musk, the controversial Tesla boss keeps bumping in and out of the No. 1 spot of richest CEO. His acquisition of Twitter (now called X) dropped his net worth somewhat, but as of March 10, 2023, he was back in that slot, according to Forbes. As of March 2023, Elon Musk was worth $180 billion.
Mark Zuckerberg has always defied the expectations of what a CEO should be. The godfather of social media who co-founded Facebook (now Meta) made his first million when he was 22 years old and never dressed in the stuffy suits of his ilk. As of 2023, he was worth $111.6 billion and the company’s market cap is $823.4 billion.
Jensen Huang, who was born in Tawain and who grew up in Thailand, co-founded the graphics-chip maker NVIDIA in 1993 where he has served as its CEO and president ever since. Though his net worth is an astonishing $36.55 billion
Amazon CEO Andrew Jassy made less money in 2022 than in 2021 due to stock options that didn’t perform as well. Amazon, the e-commerce giant founded by Jeff Bezos, has struggled with losses and operating costs, which played a role. His compensation package in 2021 was around $212 million, but he only earned a salary of $1.3 million in 2022.
Sundar Pichai was the CEO of Google for four years before his efforts got him promoted to boss of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, which owns the company that made internet searching into a verb (googling) and a whole bunch of other subsidiaries. The market cap of Alphabet is currently a juicy $1.77 trillion.
Microsoft shifted gears when it hired Satya Nadella as CEO in 2014. He spent the ensuing years adding hundreds of billions of dollars to Microsoft’s market cap — which is now valued at $2.47 trillion — while revitalizing the brand and making the software giant relevant again.
Under the helm of Amin Nasser, the Saudi Arabian oil company, Saudi Aramco, has been one of the biggest providers of crude oil to the world since 2015. With a market cap of $2.16 trillion, the company is making record profits that are surely trickling down to its CEO.
The richest CEO currently is Apple CEO Tim Cook. He didn’t become a billionaire until August 2020, right around the same time the company he heads approached a market value of $2 trillion. Today, the company’s market cap is $2.77 trillion and thriving.