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What the S&P-100's highest-paid CEOs took versus what they delivered — descriptive, primary-sourced, reproducible.
Interactive front-end over the frozen v0.2 dataset · data as of 2026-06-13 · canonical record: DOI 10.5281/zenodo.20680109 · NM AI Research, ORCID 0009-0003-4213-7769 · CC BY 4.0
League table. Granted is the Summary Compensation Table figure the press quotes. Realized (CAP) is Compensation Actually Paid — the SEC measure that re-marks equity to the share price; an accounting fair value, not cash-in-pocket. Flip the basis and the table reorders: that reordering is the central finding (F1).
Board targets. For 29 hand-curated companies, the board's own payout-versus-target set beside peer-relative delivery (F4). The metric column declares what each payout measures, because an annual-cash-bonus % and a PSU-vesting % are different things and must not be conflated (e.g. Apple's 200% is a cash bonus; Alphabet's 200% is PSU vesting). Two of the 29 (American Tower, Intel) were hand-read from rendered proxies and are not in the 98-company machine-readable spine.
Peer-relative TSR is the company's cumulative total shareholder return ($100 invested at the window start) minus the board's own chosen peer index. A lag can mean the benchmark ran hot, not that the company cratered (semiconductor peer indices inflated by Nvidia). Green = beat the chosen peers; red = lagged them.
Attribution: TSR is not caused by the CEO (macro, sector, luck, predecessor). This is a co-incidence of pay and peer-relative return, not causation — never read it as "overpaid." CAP caveat: swings with the share price; not cash received. Peer-group choice is the company's own and drives the gap. Samples differ: the league table is the 98-company automated spine (population beat-rate 46/96 ≈ a coin-flip); the 29 board-target companies are a non-random, high-pay sample — do not generalise from them.
Disclosure. The author holds no direct position in any company named. A workplace defined-contribution pension may hold some indirectly through pooled funds, not directed by the author. No third party reviewed, funded, or directed this work.
Reproducibility. Built free from SEC EDGAR DEF 14A Pay-versus-Performance disclosures (Item 402(v)); 98 companies, 539 company-years. This page embeds the frozen scorecard_v0.csv and curated_targets.csv verbatim (regenerated by build.py); the canonical, citable version is the Zenodo DOI above.