CEO salaries skyrocketed from “only” 30 times more than that of their average employees in 1976 to 276 times greater in 2017, more than twice as much as in thirteen other wealthy countries. Lest this be considered old news, by 2019 the ratio of CEO to average worker compensation had grown to 320. And then, as ordinary Americans struggled economically during the first thirteen months of the coronavirus pandemic, American billionaires’ net worth increased by an astounding 55 percent. The United States had fully entered the era of gloves-off capitalism.
