Every year the numbers land and the outrage machine fires up: our top bosses, we’re told, are being paid outrageous multiples of what every day Australians earn. But look closer at the numbers and a different story emerges.
Once a year we get to be amazed and some of us get appalled by the huge salaries that our top chief executives get to take home. And this year the media’s tapping into worker envy telling us that the typical CEO of a listed company takes home pay 45 times bigger than the Aussie worker. The question you have to ask yourself after taking this on board is this: how cranky should this make you?
The Daily Mail reports that the Australian Council of Superannuation Investors (ACSI) had a group called Ownership Matters to do a survey of what CEOs have been pocketing for doing their job. And here are the main findings: the median ASX100 CEO earned $4,800,898 in the 2024-25 financial year, some 45 times more than the average earnings a year for local full-time workers, who receive $106,657. These average workers saw a rise in pay of 3.8%, while the CEOs copped a 16% rise on average. Life360 CEO Chris Hulls was paid, wait for it, $47.7 million for his contribution in 2024-25.
Let’s look at Chris Hulls to determine if these numbers that look outrageously big can be put into perspective.
Hulls, who I interviewed after his company was listed on our ASX stock market, had recruited the sister of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Randi, to join his board in 2021.
Life360 is a family safety and location sharing technology business, which while listed here as a company, most of its business income is generated in the US, so effectively this Yank created an export business for Australia.
The Daily Mail gave me information about Hulls that I never got out of him in my interview, that he was “a former US Air Force veteran who served in Afghanistan” and created the Life360 business and APP after Hurricane Katrina wreaked havoc on many southern US states, with Louisiana’s New Orleans copping the brunt of this shocking brush with mother nature.
Importantly, what he earned needs to be put into context. First, his base salary was $US1.08 million ($A1.55 million). Then he received $US30 million ($A42.95 million) in share options, because his company did very well and his share price went through the roof, taking a lot of happy shareholders with him.
But wait, there’s more to this story that the Daily Mail and Ownership Matters have not revealed. Check out the chart below to see what has happened to Life360 and its share price in 2025-26.
Life360 (360)
From January 2024 to October 2025 the share price of 360 went from $6.94 to $54.38, which was about a 671% gain. And that’s why Hulls, his shareholders and super investors would’ve thought their CEO was a genius. Hulls got a $47 million-plus pay packet because his share price went through the roof!
This year it was smashed because the world thinks AI is coming to compete with ‘app or software as a service businesses’ such as Life360, Xero, WiseTech and others. Market watchers like yours truly believe the sell-off is excessive and these companies looked like good value after their shares were dumped.
The chart shows that 360’s share price has sneaked up since May from around $18 to $25 but it’s still a long way off the $55 share price of late 2025.
The table below shows what our top 10 CEOs were paid in 2024-25. And in most cases it was the share price performance of the companies that most explained the huge salaries.
Interestingly, AAP’s Jacob Shteyman reports that “despite the large jump in realised pay for the heads of Australia’s top 100 listed companies, their salaries have actually stagnated over the past decade and a half.”
He added that “the median base pay of an ASX100 CEO was $1.83 million, below the $1.95 million recorded in 2012.” The chart above shows how badly our stock market index (the S&P/ASX 200) has performed compared to the USA’s S&P 500.
Our top CEO pay receivers have led companies that were outperformers like many of the big US companies such as Apple, Amazon, Alphabet (Google), Microsoft, Meta (Facebook), Nvidia, Tesla, etc, which also pay huge salaries.
By the way, Mark Zuckerberg has an annual salary of $1 but annual compensation was $US27.2 million!
The CEOs of companies such as Sigma, which owns Chemist Warehouse, and Macquarie are on the top 10 list, but these have been unbelievable companies and that’s why their salaries are believably so big.
If we had more CEOs like those on the top 10 list, our overall stock market performance would’ve been better and our super balances would’ve been greater.
Yes they bloody well are outrageously overpaid