You might want to wait to read this until you’re somewhere it’s OK to scream: It would take the average American worker 3,489 years to make as much money as one top CEO took home in just one year. David Simon of shopping mall developer Simon Property snagged a pay package last year worth more than $137 million (mostly in stock awards that could eventually be worth $132 million), and the APoffers up some comparisons to illustrate just how crazy that really is:
- A minimum wage worker would need to toil about 9,096 years to equal Simon’s 2011 earnings, and it would take three years for that person to make what Simon made in an hour.
- As for a person earning the national median salary of $39,312? It would take that worker slightly more than one year to earn what Simon made in one hour.
- Simon also makes 342 times what we pay President Obama and far more than the $110 million that goes to the top 600 government leaders in the US combined.
Although most CEOs took home “just” $9.587 million, it would still take the average American almost a month to earn what the average CEO made in one hour.
