Walmart’s amazing $237-million man

by SAM PIZZIGATI

Walmart e-commerce chief Marc Lore last year pulled down, with a little help from America’s taxpayers, the equivalent of well over $4 million per week.

American taxpayers are subsidizing the windfalls that go to execs at low-wage employers like Walmart. Here’s a promising idea that could help reverse the subsidizing.

How much does the typical employee earn at Walmart, America’s largest private employer?

We don’t know exactly and won’t until next spring, when corporations begin disclosing figures on their median — most typical — worker pay. Federal regulations that went into effect just before Donald Trump took office now require this disclosure.

In the meantime, we do already know how much Walmart’s highest-paid people are making. Publicly traded companies like Walmart have to disclose what they pay their top execs. Most of what they pay comes in the form of stock, and calculating the value of these stock awards can get tricky. Accounting experts regularly disagree on which execs are actually making the most.

Earlier this month, business analysts at Bloomberg chimed in with their latest executive pay scorecard. In 2016, Bloomberg reports, four U.S. corporate executives collected over $100 million each, and a fifth, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, came up just short at $99.7 million.

America’s biggest executive pay package in 2016? That went, says Bloomberg, to an executive at Wal-Mart. Marc Lore, the CEO of Wal-Mart’s e-commerce division, ended the year with a windfall worth an incredible $236.9 million.

Let’s break that down a little. Lore essentially took in the equivalent of over $4.5 million per week. In effect, Lore earned in a single week what a Walmart worker paid $11 an hour would have to work 199 entire years to match.

This sort of discrepancy doesn’t in the least bother big-time corporate compensation consultants like Steven Hall, the managing director at Steven Hall & Partners. Nine-digit executive pay packages, Hall readily acknowledges, can seem “startling.” But, he adds, these nine-digit executives have “proven talents.”

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