Anger at CEOs goes beyond the healthcare industry. Here’s why

By Beth Kowitt

The phones at corporate security firms are ringing off the hook. Security chiefs at major organizations are convening calls to trade notes. Company websites are being scrubbed of photos of their executives.

This is only the beginning of what’s likely to be a major ramping up of corporate security protocols across the country. The shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in the middle of midtown Manhattan has boardrooms and C-suites rightly spooked. But it’s really the level of outrage that’s being directed at the company, not the killer, that has executives on edge. The public has seized on this moment to air its long list of grievances against what it views as a broken healthcare system.

But if corporate America’s directors and top executives are only talking about and investing in security practices, they’re treating the symptom rather than the underlying disease. The issue goes deeper than just the healthcare industry, encompassing a broader business world that the public increasingly says it distrusts. “Companies need to acknowledge that the root cause of this [anger] is not treating humans with dignity and respect,” says Alison Taylor, New York University business school professor and author of Higher Ground: How Business Can Do the Right Thing in a Turbulent World.

I spent some time this year trying to make sense of why Americans’ faith in big business has seriously eroded over the last few decades. As I reported then, the percentage of Americans who say they have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in major companies is today only 16 per cent, about half the rate of 25 years ago, according to Gallup. We need only look at a few key numbers to understand where this sentiment originates:

The top 1per cent now hold a greater percentage of wealth than the entire middle 40 per cent; thirty years ago, the reverse was true. To get to this point, the wealth of the very richest had to grow exponentially faster than that of the poorest.

Corporate profits now make up a larger share of GDP, while worker compensation has lost ground. In the 1980s, after-tax corporate profits accounted for 5.5 per cent of GDP, according to David Kelly, chief global strategist with JPMorgan Asset Management; by 2023, they had reached nearly 10 per cent. Over the same time period, worker compensation declined from 55.8 per cent to 52.1 per cent of GDP.

In 1965, the CEO-to-worker pay ratio was 21-to-one, meaning it would take 21 years for a typical employee to match what their CEO made in a year. In 2022, the ratio was 344-to-one, according to the Economic Policy Institute, with a projected average compensation of CEOs at the 350 largest publicly owned US companies at $25.2 million.

The average American probably can’t rattle off these stats — but they may feel their implications in their day-to-day life. As I wrote earlier this year, for many ordinary people, it seems like the US economy and the companies they work for are breaking the covenant to provide “a society where a job and hard work would let you pay your bills, maybe buy a house, and where, regardless of background, each generation could advance by building on the achievements of the last.”

There will be the temptation to button up security and call the problem solved, to blame social media for eroding the discourse and giving people a platform to be their worst selves. Understandable impulses, but ones that miss an opportunity.

The alternative is for companies to look squarely at this anger and it take seriously. Outbursts of anti-corporate sentiment have happened before: the Occupy Wall Street movement, for one. And they’re likely to keep happening more frequently and — unfortunately, violently — unless the business world does something to address the ways it has exacerbated the income gap and the feeling that fatter corporate profits come at the expense of everything and everyone else.

Bloomberg News has reported that security is already up, with median spending by S&P 500 companies that disclosed security costs doubling from 2021 to 2023 to almost $100,000, according to Equilar.

Among those at the top end is Meta Platforms Inc. CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who received $23.4 million last year from the company for his and his family’s personal security. He is also one of the super-rich to reportedly have built a luxury survivalist bunker.

These fortresses might save the wealthiest Americans from doomsday, but it’s only putting them further out of reach — literally and figuratively— of the workers and consumers who power their companies.