Taser Boss Tops Ranking of Highest-Paid CEOs, With $165 Million. Here’s the List.

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Taser Boss Tops Ranking of Highest-Paid CEOs, With $165 Million. Here’s the List.

Stock award propels Rick Smith past Apple’s Tim Cook and Blackstone’s Schwarzman to the top of WSJ’s annual ranking

By Theo Francis and Inti Pacheco, WSJ

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June 1, 2025 5:30 am ET

• Axon Enterprise CEO Rick Smith topped CEO pay in 2024 with $165 million, surpassing leaders of larger firms.

• Half of the analyzed CEOs made at least $17.1 million, up from $15.8 million the prior year, based on a MyLogIQ analysis.

• Smith’s compensation largely comes from stock awards tied to market targets, part of a program open to all Axon employees.

Rick Smith, who co-founded and runs the maker of Taser stun guns, tops this year’s list of the highest-paid chief executives, with pay of $165 million.

The Axon Enterprise CEO’s AXON 2.75%increase; green up pointing triangle pay outstripped that of the leaders of much larger companies, including General Electric’s Larry Culp, Blackstone’s Steve Schwarzman and Apple’s AAPL 0.45%increase; green up pointing triangle Tim Cook. Smith was the only S&P 500 CEO to receive a pay package above $100 million in 2024.

Overall, CEO pay set another record. Half the chief executives in The Wall Street Journal’s annual analysis made $17.1 million or more last year, up from $15.8 million for the same executives a year earlier, the analysis of pay data from MyLogIQ found.

JPMorgan boss Jamie Dimon came in at No. 23 with $37.7 million, while No. 63 Mark Zuckerberg got $27 million from Meta last year, mostly for security services. Tesla’s Elon Musk, whose last pay package has become a legal battle, came in last at $0.

Like most CEOs, much of Smith’s compensation came from a stock award, not salary. His May 2024 award is tied to a series of market and operating targets over several years.

It isn’t the first big payday for Smith, who has run the company since 1993. In 2019, Axon reported pay of $246 million for him based on a similar stock award, when the company wasn’t in the S&P 500. Smith jointly ran the company with his brother Thomas for two decades, securing rights for the technology and developing the Taser into a common tool for police forces.

Smith said his 2024 award was granted under a new program open to all Axon employees, allowing them to convert some or all of their pay over seven years into restricted shares that could triple in number or be cut to zero depending how the company performs. It was narrowly approved by shareholders last year.

“One of the things I love about the design is I can make zero—I feel better about making a lot if I can also make zero,” Smith said in an interview. “For me it creates that startup kind of vibe.”

Axon’s share price has gained about 160% over the past year, pushing its market capitalization above $50 billion and helping to raise the value of the shares underlying Smith’s award to around $500 million at recent prices. Two of seven performance targets had been met by March, company filings said.

A handful of executives outside the S&P 500 also made more than $100 million last year, including Peter Gassner of cloud-computing company Veeva Systems, at $172.4 million, and Shopify’s Tobias Lütke, at $150 million. It marks the fewest CEOs making nine figures since 2016.

The Journal’s analysis used data from MyLogIQ, a provider of public-company data, and included CEOs on the job for at least a year at more than 400 S&P 500 companies reporting pay through mid-May for fiscal years ending after June 30, 2024.