Tim McHugh, the co-president and chief financial officer of Welltower — a real-estate investment trust that owns and rents housing to old people — received $167 million in compensation last year. The year before, he made $7.2 million. The board of directors calls this a retention program.
The machine behind the number is the system’s confession. Welltower adopted a new plan: ten-year horizon, top executives, one-time stock grants that do not begin to vest for five years. McHugh’s grant was roughly $164 million. The company says these awards represent “the sole form of executives’ compensation for the next 10 years other than salary.” A decade’s pay, delivered in a single proxy filing, on the theory that a man needs $167 million to stay.
The mechanism that produces this number is oiled and silent. The compensation committee — staffed, by long custom, by other executives and their allies — approves a grant that would have invited a shareholder revolt a generation ago. The committee members sit on other boards. The consultants who set the benchmark are paid by the company whose pay they benchmark. The peer groups are drawn to exclude anyone who might drag the median down. The largest institutional investors, who hold the stock of every company whose finance chiefs are now making eight figures, vote with management on compensation as a matter of routine. The stock rises. The paper value swells. The proxy records the figure. Market-rate. The board nods. Restart.
McHugh is not the outlier. He is the leading edge. Three finance chiefs cleared $100 million in 2025. Among chief executives, the trend runs deeper still: six companies paid nine-figure sums to multiple executives in the same year. At Summit Therapeutics, the chief operating officer and CFO Manmeet Soni received a package valued at over $249 million — much of it from a midstream modification to old options, restructured to vest slowly provided he stays. The modification alone was valued at $248 million. Former Fermi CFO Miles Everson collected $134 million in stock awards, then stepped down months later. Tesla’s Vaibhav Taneja got $139 million in 2024. Oracle’s Safra Catz got $138 million in 2021. The drop from McHugh to the nearest name is a canyon: Alphabet’s Anat Ashkenazi, the second-highest-paid CFO, made $31.3 million. McHugh out-earns her by $135 million. He out-earns most CEOs. He out-earns, by himself, the entire AIG Financial Products unit — the unit whose bets brought AIG to its knees — which received $165 million in retention bonuses in 2009, the year the American taxpayer committed $182 billion to keep the firm alive. That was called a scandal. This is called Monday.
The median CFO in the S&P 500 earned $6 million, roughly two hundred times the typical American worker’s wage. McHugh made 28 times that median. The pattern is the one that, across decades, has given us Dennis Kozlowski’s $6,000 shower curtain, charged to Tyco, before he was convicted of looting the firm. It is the one that, at Enron, left 4,000 employees without jobs and watched their retirement savings evaporate while executives cashed out. The mechanism is simple: tie executive pay to stock price, and the stock price will be managed to maximize executive pay. Sometimes that means cutting costs. Sometimes it means raising prices. Sometimes it means buying back shares. It always means that the people who do the actual work — the nurses, the aides, the janitors — get a smaller piece of a growing pie.
Welltower is a REIT, which means it pays no corporate income tax as long as it distributes most of its income to shareholders. The shareholders include the executives. The residents are old. The rent is due on the first. Rents rise to meet shareholder return targets while the old people’s Social Security checks barely move. The CFO’s pay is $167 million.
Nobody needed $167 million to stay. Somebody shoplifts baby formula tonight and somebody else will.