C-Suite
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Executive pay climbed again in 2025—and the CEO-to-worker gap kept widening
Elon Musk earned more in fiscal year 2025 than any other public company executive—by an almost incomprehensible margin. His $158.4 billion Tesla stock award, reinstated by the Delaware Supreme Court after years of litigation, placed him atop the annual executive compensation rankings published by C-Suite Comp, whose data covers approximately 3,700 public company chief executives…
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Meet the SpaceX insiders Elon Musk trusts to run his $1.25 trillion empire
Everyone knows Elon Musk is the genius behind the biggest stock market debut of all time. But even a genius, in the immortal words of Jim Collins, needs a thousand helpers. So who, exactly, is helping him run SpaceX? The company Musk founded in an El Segundo, Calif. warehouse in 2002 is not quite the…
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With the exits of Apple’s Tim Cook and Dow’s Jim Fitterling, the Fortune 500 is losing two groundbreaking gay CEOs—leaving just one
When Jim Fitterling of Dow and Tim Cook of Apple step down as CEOs in July and September respectively, the Fortune 500 will lose two widely respected leaders who led their companies through transformational eras. The exits of the two men, who both identify as gay, will also mark a dispiriting step backward for LGBTQ+…
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Citi, Ford, and Experian share their strategies for scaling AI agents
“To be able to trust, you need to be able to see what is happening.” This seemingly simple maxim is at the heart of today’s AI rollouts across the business landscape, according to Laura Heisman, the chief marketing officer of Dynatrace. “That’s probably the biggest conversation that everybody is having across all industries. We hear…
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BYD wants to become the world’s largest automaker in five years. Stella Li is the executive selling that vision to the world
When Wang Chuanfu, CEO of Chinese EV company BYD, told shareholders in Shenzhen this week that the company would become the world’s largest automaker within five years, he pointed to growing production and sales overseas as one of the major paths to get there. As BYD faces increasing pressure at home, this international expansion has…
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Silicon Valley legend Vinod Khosla tears into ‘idiotic, short-sighted and very selfish’ Gen Z Stanford protests of Google CEO: ‘the stupidity’
Vinod Khosla has seen a lot in his decades at the top of Silicon Valley. He’s not impressed by what he saw at Stanford over the weekend. The billionaire venture capitalist and Sun Microsystems co-founder lashed out on X at student protesters who walked out of Stanford’s 135th commencement ceremony while Google CEO Sundar Pichai…
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The management lesson behind FedEx Freight’s break from FedEx
At what point does a business need a different operating model? FedEx Freight CEO John Smith believes his company has reached that point. The newly independent company, which spun off from FedEx earlier this month, generates roughly $9 billion in annual revenue and operates one of the largest less-than-truckload networks in North America. Until recently,…
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More and more of Musk’s companies end up under the same roof. Here’s a look at his sprawling empire
Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and now first-ever trillionaire, controls a lot of different businesses. Electric vehicles. Brain implants. Underground tunnels. A social media platform once called Twitter. And a rocket maker that blasted off its trading from Wall Street this week. Over time, more and more of these ventures have found themselves under…
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SpaceX CFO Bret Johnsen quietly engineered its historic IPO and became an overnight billionaire
While Elon Musk has extended his lead as the world’s richest man, the SpaceX IPO that made him a trillionaire has quietly boosted the wealth of thousands of his employees—from welders to his longtime lieutenants. Among that throng of people is Bret Johnsen, who has served as the company’s only chief financial officer and acted…
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AI can be a ‘secret sauce’ or a way of ‘democratizing mediocrity’—Here’s how business leaders are getting the best of the technology
Much of the marketing world is handing over creative tasks to AI with fairly mixed results. But Dan Murphy, who leads marketing at canned beverage brand Liquid Death, said AI models can’t get close to the unique original concepts human writers do. In the world of chief marketing officers, AI might not be the panacea…