Meager Rewards for Workers, Exceptionally Rich Pay for C.E.O.s

The gap between workers and C.E.O.s widened during the pandemic as public companies granted top executives some of the richest pay packages ever.

Even in a gilded age for executive pay, 2020 was a blowout year. A comprehensive survey of the 200 highest-paid chief executives at public companies conducted for The New York Times by Equilar, an executive compensation consulting firm, revealed some of the biggest pay packages on record, and showed that the gap between C.E.O.s and everybody else widened during the pandemic. Alexander Karp, the chief executive of Palantir, a data mining company that gets over half its revenue from government contracts, was the highest paid C.E.O. at a publicly traded company, with compensation worth $1.1 billion.