One Man, One Year, and $167 Million = Absolute Greed

⏱️ 13 min read            

Hi everyone, and welcome to my podcast, That’s Life, I Swear. I’m your host, Rick Barron

Somewhere in Ohio this month, a senior on a fixed income opened a rent renewal notice from a company called Welltower and braced for the increase. 

They had no way of knowing that the man signing off on their building's books had just taken home enough money in a single year to cover that rent, for that building, for centuries. 

His name is Tim McHugh. He is not the CEO. He is the chief financial officer — the company's accountant-in-chief — and in 2025 he was paid $167 million. 

Call it what it is: not compensation, but a number so detached from ordinary life that it has stopped behaving like money at all. It’s greed and absolute disgust.

Welcome to That's Life, I Swear. This podcast is about life's happenings in this world that conjure up such words as intriguing, frightening, life-changing, inspiring, and more. I'm Rick Barron your host. 

That said, here's the rest of this story : 

There is a particular kind of vertigo that sets in when you try to hold two facts in your head at the same time. 

Fact one: median pay for a chief financial officer at one of America's largest companies is now $6 million a year, itself an amount that would take a typical American worker more than a century to earn. 

Fact two: the man at the very top of that list didn't just clear the bar — he cleared it by more than $135 million. Tim McHugh, co-president and CFO of Welltower, a real estate trust that makes its money renting housing to senior citizens, took home nearly $167 million in 2025. The year before, he made $7.2 million. 

Nobody got 23 times better at their job in twelve months. What changed was a single piece of paper: a new ten-year pay program, approved by Welltower's own board, that loaded nearly $164 million of stock onto his desk in one motion.

Sit with that arithmetic for a second, because the company that handed it to him runs senior housing — the same sector quietly raising rents on people living on Social Security checks that haven't kept pace with their own grocery bills in years. The irony isn't subtle. It isn't even an irony, really. It's just the system working exactly as designed.

The Club Nobody Asked to Join

McHugh isn't alone up there, and that's arguably the more disturbing part of the story. He's the headline because his number is the biggest, but he is one of seven finance executives in modern American corporate history to ever crack the nine-figure threshold — and three of them did it in 2025 alone. Three in one year, after a stretch of relative restraint, as if the door that had been propped shut swung wide open again the moment nobody was watching.

Manmeet Soni, who runs finance and operations at biopharmaceutical company Summit Therapeutics, pulled in more than $249 million — technically higher than McHugh's number, though it didn't make the marquee comparison because Summit isn't large enough to sit in the S&P 500. 

Most of that sum wasn't even new money; it was the board retroactively sweetening stock options it had granted him two years earlier, juicing the value by $248 million with a stroke of the pen. Miles Everson, who briefly ran finance at the power company Fermi before it forced out its own CEO and then pushed Everson out the door too, still walked away with more than $134 million on his way to a quieter seat on the board.

Hold the phone! You heard right, and let me repeat that again. A man can get fired — sorry, "step down" — from a company in turmoil and still leave with nine figures. There is no factory floor, no warehouse, no hospital ward, no classroom in America where that sentence makes any sense at all.

The Gap That Keeps Getting Wider, on Purpose

None of this is happening in a vacuum, and none of it is an accident. Across the broader American workforce, the typical CEO now earns somewhere between 99 and 216 times what their median employee takes home, depending on which measure you use — and both of those figures climbed again in the past year, continuing a trend that has worsened every single year since 2022.

Stretch the lens back further and the picture turns from uncomfortable to obscene: since 1978, average CEO pay in this country has rocketed up by more than 1,000 percent, while the take-home pay of the people actually doing the work has crawled forward by roughly a quarter over nearly five decades — a period in which the economy, by every productive measure, grew far faster than that.

At the very worst offenders — the hundred largest low-wage employers in the country — the gap isn't measured in double digits anymore. It's measured in the hundreds, sometimes thousands, to one. One major retail chain's CEO has taken home a pay package worth more than 6,600 times what the company's typical worker earns in a year. That's not a salary difference. That's two different economic species occupying the same office building.

And the people paying for it know exactly what's happening to them. Most American households now say price increases are outrunning their paychecks. Grocery bills, rent, insurance, the basics — climbing faster than wages for years running, while corporate boards wave through stock grants that treat $100 million as an unremarkable bonus for finance executives whose primary job is, fundamentally, to manage spreadsheets. 

Eighty percent of workers, when surveyed, say plainly that their CEOs are overpaid. A similar share say they'd support taxing companies that let the gap between executive and worker pay grow too extreme. This isn't fringe outrage. This is the broad, exhausted consensus of people watching their own purchasing power shrink while executive pay packages get measured in the same units used for national lottery jackpots.

The Excuse Machine

Ask the people who design these packages why this keeps happening, and the answers arrive smooth and well-rehearsed, boilerplate style: 

1.      Retention 

2.      Competition for talent

3.      Alignment with shareholder interest 

4.      Performance criteria

Compensation consultants will tell you, not incorrectly, that finance chiefs are shouldering more pressure than ever — tariffs, market swings, geopolitical shocks, the sheer complexity of running a modern public company. Boards will point to total shareholder return, and at Welltower, that return really was strong: nearly 50 percent in 2025. Someone, somewhere, will always be able to construct a chart that makes a $167 million payday look earned.

But strip away the consultant-speak and what's left is simpler and uglier: companies pay these sums because they can, because shareholders mostly let them, and because the alternative — paying workers more, capping executive stock grants, tying pay to something other than a rising stock chart that any market can produce in a good year — would require boards to choose differently. 

They aren't choosing differently. Stock buybacks at America's largest low-wage employers have totaled hundreds of billions of dollars over the past half-decade — money that inflates the very share price executives are rewarded for, money that could instead have funded years of meaningful raises for the people stocking shelves, cleaning rooms, and answering phones at those same companies.

What This Story Is Really About

This was never really a story about Tim McHugh. He's simply the name attached to the largest number this particular cycle. The real story is what it says about a system that can, with a straight face, hand one finance executive $167 million in stock while the seniors his own company houses watch their rent climb against fixed incomes, while inflation eats into paychecks that haven't meaningfully grown in real terms in decades, and while the broad public — across nearly every political line — has reached the same blunt conclusion: this is not earned, this is not deserved, and this is not sustainable. 

What can we learn from this story? What's the takeaway?

1. The gap isn't closing — it's accelerating. After a brief dip in 2022 and 2023, nine-figure executive pay packages came roaring back in 2025, and the broader CEO-to-worker pay ratio climbed for the fourth consecutive year. Whatever correction people hoped for after the pandemic-era backlash against executive pay clearly did not materialize.

2. The justifications are real, but they don't add up to the number. Boards point to retention pressure, market volatility, and shareholder returns. Those pressures are genuine. But none of them explain a 23-fold pay increase in a single year for the same person doing, broadly, the same job — the honest explanation is simply that a board decided to write a very large check, and almost nothing stopped them.

3. Public anger here is not a fringe position — it's the consensus. The overwhelming majority of American workers believe executive pay is excessive, and a majority would support tax penalties on companies with extreme pay gaps. That kind of broad agreement, cutting across income levels and political affiliation, rarely shows up in polling on economic issues. When it does, it tends to mean the gap has crossed from "uncomfortable" into "untenable."

The deeper lesson: executive compensation has become almost entirely disconnected from the lived economics of the people who work underneath it, and the companies involved are, for now, betting that public disgust stays just below the threshold of actual consequence. 

Well, there you go, my friends; that's life, I swear

For further information regarding the material covered in this episode, I invite you to visit my website, which can be found on Apple Podcasts, for show notes and the episode transcript.

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