General Motors Chair and CEO Mary Barra took home slightly less money last year than she did in 2021, largely because her bonus shrank. But she still remains the highest paid CEO of the Detroit Three automakers.
GM’s CFO Paul Jacobson and President Mark Reuss both saw a hike in total compensation due in part to receiving more stock options. But other top brass came in either flat against or slightly below their 2021 total compensation.
All the executives earned smaller bonus payments due to increased aggressive financial targets set by the board of directors at the end of 2021. GM spokeswoman Colleen Oberc said the executives hit their targets, but because the targets were so much higher, the percentage difference between the yearly results shrank, so the bonus payouts were smaller.
In its annual executive compensation report that GM filed to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday, GM reported that Barra made a total of $28,979,570 in 2022 compared with $29,136,780 million in 2021 for running the company and chairing the board of directors. For 2020, Barra took home $23.7 million in total compensation and $21.6 million in 2019
How Barra compares to other CEOs, average Joe
In GM’s filing, the automaker lists Barra’s 2021 base salary as $2.1 million, flat when compared with 2021. This is the third consecutive year Barra topped her crosstown rivals.
At Ford Motor Co., CEO Jim Farley received total compensation of $21 million last year, according to filings with the government last month. Stellantis, which owns Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep and Ram brands, reported in February that its CEO Carlos Tavares had total compensation of $24.8 million (23.5 million euros) in 2022.
But none of the CEOs topped what Stellantis paid last year to Mike Manley, the former CEO of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, as part of an agreement inked before the merger with Peugeot maker PSA Group, which created Stellantis in 2021. According to the annual SEC filing, Manley, who retired as Stellantis’ head of Americas in November 2021 to become CEO of AutoNation, was paid $54.1 million (51.2 million euros).
Meanwhile, the ratio of Barra’s total compensation to the median of all GM employees’ total compensation is 362 to 1. The median pay for GM’s global employees in 2022 was $80,034, according to GM, up from $69,433 a year before.
What the company pays Barra
- $2.1 million in salary
- $14.6 million in stock awards
- $4.9 million in option awards
- Nearly $6.3 million in incentive plan compensation
- $1.1 million in other payments
How other executive leaders did
In GM’s filing, it also listed the 2022 total compensation of other key GM officers:
- President Mark Reuss: $14,349,551, up from $12,535,747 in 2021.
- CFO Paul Jacobson: $10,235,938, up from $9,578,648 in 2021.
- President of North America Steve Carlisle: $8,794,966 down from $8,980,204 in 2021.
- Executive Vice President of Global Product Development, Purchasing and Supply Chain Doug Parks: $8,779,236 down from $8,835,477 in 2021.
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Contact Jamie L. LaReau at jlareau@freepress.com. Follow her on Twitter @jlareauan. Read more on General Motors and sign up for our autos newsletter. Become a subscriber.