Power Alley: I Will No Longer Do Yearly Trend Reports, On Merck CEO Compensation... It Is ALL Ridiculous -- But Now "Normal" In The USA...

I just can't waste energy on something that will never become rational, again. Pharma CEOs do very complicated, life-saving work -- true. They manage immense complexity, and often conflicting regulatory environments, dotting the globe. And they make tons of money for shareholders -- paying out hefty dividends for decades on end. So yes, they should be well paid. But $20 million a year means about $100 million in just five years. That is silly. Same way paying a baseball player $100 million on a five year contract is. . . silly.

There is no sense in which any of these people are objectively "worth the money". But that ship has sailed. It is now what the "market will bear" pricing.

Said another way, I can't boil the ocean away, with my Zippo lighter (as I don't even own one, anyway!). So, here's FiercePharma, on it all -- for my last look at his pay, in all likelihood:

. . .Merck has handed out another hefty raise to CEO Rob Davis, boosting his compensation by 13% to $23.2 million in 2024, according to the company’s 2025 proxy statement.

Since taking the reins from former helmsman Ken Frazier, Davis has seen his pay scale up quickly, from $13.7 million in 2021 to $18.6 million in 2022 and $20.3 million in 2023.

The compensation package for Davis measures up to those for other U.S. pharma honchos last year such as Eli Lilly’s David Ricks ($29.2 million), Pfizer’s Albert Bourla, Ph.D., ($24.6 million), Johnson & Johnson’s Joaquin Duato ($24.3 million) and Gilead Sciences' Daniel O’Day ($23.7 million). . . .

What I will still rail on and on about. . . will be these nutty crypto-CEOs -- running vastly money losing operations, to essentially switch on a warehouse full of high end processor cores, and then wait around in the lunchroom, for them to find Bitcoin block mining rewards. That is a moron's job -- but Riot CEO Les paid himself in 2024 (wait for it!) over $83.5 million to do that silly job.

As I've said before, he made in 2024, about $9 million MORE than the CEO of Apple -- Tim Cook. Cook runs a $2 trillion enterprise, that is wildly profitable, for decades now -- globe wide. This Les guy sits in dusty West Texas, and comes in in the morning to throw on a circuit breaker. That's it. Damn.

That is just stoopid -- with two o's. Onward.

नमस्ते