Airbnb's Megawatt Payday and Should Billionaires Exist?

26.04.2024 - 18:29 / skift.com / Brian Chesky / Rashaad Jorden / Seth Borko / Sarah Kopit

Travel executive pay is a topic we’ve covered extensively at Skift. In this episode of the Skift Travel Podcast, our full-time hosts, Editor-in-Chief Sarah Kopit and Head of Research Seth Borko discuss several issues related to those often large pay packages — including compensation for Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky, whose 10-year pay package could turn into $1 billion or more.

Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Overcast | Pocket Casts | Google Podcasts | Amazon | RSS

Sarah Kopit: Welcome back to the Skift Travel Podcast with Seth and Sarah. I am the aforementioned Sarah Kopit, Skift’s editor-in chief, joined as always by Skift’s Head of Research Seth Borko. Say hello, Seth.

Seth Borko: Hey, everybody. Great to see you, Sarah.

Kopit: So today, fresh off the heels of the release of annual financial reports, we are discussing one of my favorite topics — executive compensation. People just love to talk about pay. Get this: in 2022, the Economic Policy Institute estimated that CEOs were paid 344 times as much as a typical worker. In contrast to 1965, when they were paid only 21 times as much.

We’re likely not going to settle any arguments today about so-called late stage capitalism. But we are going to drill down into the most eye-watering figures being thrown around in the travel industry and beyond. And we’re going to discuss how those compensation numbers relate to the performance of the companies in question. So Seth, CEO pay, let’s talk about Brian Chesky.

Borko: So Brian Chesky, if you don’t know him, the CEO and founder of Airbnb, in many ways revolutionized the travel industry. The company went public in late 2020, and immediately became the second most valuable public travel company in the world. It’s still worth something over $90 billion on the market today. And right before it went public, they gave Brian Chesky a brand new pay package.

And it’s a really interesting one. He was making like $150,000 a year. And they cut his salary to $1 a year. Okay. And in exchange, they gave him about 12 million shares of stock in his soon-to-be public company.

It’s right on the cusp of IPO and the eve of the IPO, they give him this new executive compensation plan. And it’s 12 million shares of the new company or its old company, but now public company. And they’re set to invest in ten equal blocks. So every year, he gets another 1.2 million shares if he can meet these increasingly higher and higher stock price goals. And the company goes public. It goes from like some like $68, $70 — it immediately jumps to like $120, $140 a share, something like that.

Today, it’s like $160 a share. So those 12 million shares are now worth a lot of money. And so all of a sudden, it was always a big pay package. But it’s become something