there's never been actually data like this before we've never known what CEOs actually do and and
now we have some really rich data that we can dig into Fortune 500 CEOs consistently make headlines
for making more money in a single year than most of us could hope to earn in our entire lives
in 2020 the top 350 CEOs in the US made over 24 million dollars on average that means at my
current salary I'd have to work over I don't know 281 years to make what they made in one year Tim
Cook the CEO of Apple was awarded 853 million dollars in total compensation for his work in
2021. Mr Tim Apple wasn't even the biggest earner last year rivian CEO RJ skarange took
home 2.3 billion dollars in total compensation Good morning Joe lots of comparisons now between
Elon Musk and rivian founder RJ skaringe but while musk owns more than 20 percent of Tesla
RJ owns only about 1.7 of Rivia now RJ is now a billionaire and the one and only Elon Musk
was awarded more than 10 billion dollars in Tesla options stop if you don't like it
suppose so yeah I mean from the money that you sell all your stuff you could buy new stuff
perhaps these two are a little more deserving because they were the founders or very early
personal investors in highly risky companies utilizing unproven technology but most CEOs
didn't take such personal risk and many are still enjoying nine-figure salaries that is not my fault
this isn't another video to complain about how unfair it is that the average Fortune 500 CEO
is now earning more than 324 times the median employee at their company we have all heard
it before and it doesn't look like it's going to change anytime soon no matter how much the
internet complains about it now would be a good time to remember the age-old anecdote if you can't
beat them join them so it's time to learn how money Works to get yourself a step-by-step guide
on Landing a job as an egregiously overcompensated corporate fat CEO this week's lesson was brought
to you by Helix and you will need a good night's sleep if you want to become a CEO for
a while I had told myself the reason I didn't sleep well was simply because I was stressed
and that it came with the territory of being an investment banker since I quit that job I still
haven't been able to get a good night's sleep that is until I got my Helix mattress everybody
is different and Helix knows that so they made a sleep quiz that matches your unique body type and
sleep preferences to the perfect mattress for you as a side sleeper who prefers a mattress that's
not too hard not too soft medium feel the quiz suggested the midnight Luxe king mattress was
the right one for me it provides luxury memory foam for pressure point reliefs on my hips and
shoulders so I don't feel like I've injured myself when I wake up in the morning I even got
the glacio attacks cooling cover on my mattress and it keeps me cool when I sleep I've had my
Helix sleep for a month now and I am shocked with how much different my sleep experience has
been with it I recommended it to my parents and they took the Helix sleep quiz and now have one
too the best part of all of this is that Helix delivers your mattress right to your door with
free shipping in the US the mattress comes rolled up in a box and is super easy to set up yourself
if it makes you nervous to buy something you haven't tried Helix has a 100 night sleep trial
so you'll get more than three months to make sure that you love it if you don't they'll pick it up
for you and you'll get a full refund plus Helix mattresses have a 10 year warranty and they even
offer financing options and flexible payment plans so a great night's sleep is never far
away Helix sleep makes mattresses and bedding that are customized to fit your needs and conveniently
shipped right to your door I love my Helix and I think you would too if you are looking
for a new bed check out Helix you can click on the link below or go to helixsleep.com forward
slash how many works and get up to 200 off your Helix mattress plus two free pillows of the 500
CEOs on the fortune magazines list only 21 were the founders or co-founders of the companies they
lead so if you want the abbreviated step-by-step guide then step one start a multi-billion dollar
company and don't get fired by the board or retire congratulations you're now at Fortune 500 CEO That
Was Easy by the time you have completed step one of this guide you will probably already
be a billionaire so maybe the thought of a day job however well compensated might have lost its
appeal anyway 21 out of 500 is pretty bad odds so let's go for the more involved but safer set
of instructions the remaining 479 chief executive officers got their jobs by working their way up
through corporate roles which starts with college I know my video last week was all about thinking
twice before committing to a college degree but if you want the top job at one of these companies
a degree is mandatory every single non-founding CEO of a Fortune 500 company has a college degree
out of the 21 founding CEOs 16 of them have at least a bachelor's degree and the remaining five
like Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of schools like Harvard because their businesses started taking
off before they could finish their degree I know the story of a high school dropout starting a
successful company is popular but the numbers don't lie if you want to get to this level you
need to go to college Society has rules and the first rule is you go to college you want to have
a happy and successful life you go to college if you want to be somebody you go to college if you
want to fit in you go to college you also need to go to a good college almost 10 percent of
the list of non-founding CEOs went to just one particular school that's right DeVry University
yeah no obviously it was Harvard the other Ivy League schools are very well represented in this
group of CEOs as well once you get into one of these schools you need to pick what to study
41 of Fortune 500 CEOs have an MBA which is a masters of Business Administration so that's
a solid pick MBA programs focus on business structures corporate governance and the rules
of Executives and organizations so it makes sense that this is a top pick a lot of companies will
actually make their senior Executives complete an MBA part-time while working their regular
hours it's a grueling task on top of the regular commitments of a corporate executive but sometimes
the companies actually pay for their Executives to get these degrees because of how valuable
they can be in addition to the lessons you learn about the general mechanics of running a company
the connections you can make at an ivy league are worth the tuition costs themselves so many
powerful and influential people coming from these schools creates a self-fulfilling prophecy of more
people coming from these schools because they spent their time there interacting with powerful
and influential people so if you want to be a fortune fan 500 CEO your best chance will come
from getting into an Ivy League MBA program and networking like crazy while you're there but an
MBA is a master's degree master's degrees are postgraduate degrees which means you need to
get an undergraduate or bachelor's degree first picking the right degree straight out of high
school might feel like a bit of a crap shoot but Fortune 500 CEOs overwhelmingly favor one type of
degree above the others you might think this would be a business finance or economics degree but you
would be wrong 97 of the 500 CEOs on this list studied engineering as an undergraduate there is
some selection bias to this engineering is a tough degree to get into and unlike law or medicine it
does not have a narrow path of progression but Engineers are still a highly prized asset in the
business World Fortune 500 CEO Engineers who were interviewed about their careers admitted that they
chose to study engineering because it had the lowest unemployment rates and great options for
career advancement people that are thinking like that at the age of 18 are people that will go on
the lead Fortune 500 company companies and people like that pick engineering we hire great Engineers
as fast as we can find them Engineers are trained to be good with numbers and complicated sets of
information but they are also trained to use their skills to complete projects while collaborating
with other people with differing expertise Engineers are also quite valuable to startups
as early technical employees the list of Fortune 500 companies is dominated by businesses that were
one startups not very long ago and early employees with the right skills are prime candidates for the
top job once the founder steps down the school you complete your bachelor's degree at is much
less important than the school you get your MBA from the most represented undergraduate
school amongst the Fortune 500 CEOs was still harbored but only three of them went for their
bachelor's degree with the rest of the list spread out amongst more than 300 other schools so just go
to the best school you can and work on being near the top of your class which will make Step 2 a lot
easier the average age of a Fortune 500 CEO is 57 so don't worry once you have graduated from your
engineering degree you have plenty of time to work on your career to get yourself into a Harvard MBA
if you want to be the CEO of a big company you have two options option one is to start
working with promising startups if you hit your wagon to the next school or Amazon you will be
a prime Contender for the top job and you would have likely picked up some stock options along
the way according to the New York Times the average net worth of the first 2200 Microsoft
employees is over 10 million dollars so even if they never made CEO they shouldn't ever need to
work again this strategy is very risky because for every Microsoft there are thousands of other
businesses with 2200 employees that don't grow at all or even worse end up going bankrupt to
increase your chances of making this strategy work you should Target a business with around 1
000 employees with good institutional backing from a private Equity Firm and operating in a
field with a lot of room for growth Tech Finance health care and direct to Consumer are all good
options once you land that first job you gotta do the hard part which is work like crazy Outlast the
other employees hope the company does well and be be in the right place at the right time when the
founder steps back and needs a new CEO if you want to take a more active Approach at Landing
the top job then you should start your career off in a more established company preferably one with
a good amount of business pedigree bulge rack and investment Banks like Goldman and high-end
management consulting firms like McKinsey should be your top pick I'll explain why later but the
competition for graduate programs that these companies is fierce so if you can't get in here
almost any big company will do your mission at this stage is to get to an executive level role
as quickly as possible doing good work is critical to this but it will only get you so far you need
to Market yourself in every way that you can to become your own brand name in the industry social
media if used correctly can be great for this my good friend Richard over at the plain bagel
works as an investment analyst but he is well known outside of his firm because of his YouTube
channel now you don't have to take it that far but putting yourself out there will mean that you
can make it a lot easier for you to jump between jobs as you skip up the corporate ladder internal
promotions are slow and difficult to get in most large companies the average employee that switches
employers every two years earns fifty percent more than the average employee that stays around for
longer if you do a good job of marketing yourself inside your industry you are more likely to walk
into a job interview where the recruiter already knows about you or something good you have done
which is a huge advantage over the regular schmuck with less than 500 connections on their LinkedIn
profile you can also fast track this process the reason working at a top investment banker
management consulting firm is a good place to start is because you can work two years at one
of these institutions as an analyst and gain more experience than you would in a decade at
a regular company recruiters know this so the exit opportunities for bankers and Consultants
can be extremely good and you can often score an executive level role before you are 30. the
traditional route would be to go from an analyst to a team lead to a manager and then finally on to
an executive which will take a lot more time unless you get lucky with your job switching
a word of advice based on my own experience and no further research at all is that if you do want
to go the investment banking or Consulting route you should avoid an exit into tech companies even
if you are an engineer by education you should be able to land a good job with these outfits but it
will be difficult to move up because the culture of these businesses tend to look down with their
soy lattes and on tap kombucha on the old school business Bros who totally don't even know how to
hacky sack a better plan is to get a job at a big company that is really boring a boring company is
going to have less young Talent which means you won't be competing against every other Hot Shot
career driven 30 year old to get an executive position once you have worked yourself into a
role where you are overseeing at least 200 other employees it's time again to start thinking about
that Harvard MBA personal branding is again going to play a big role in getting you into this highly
coveted course Harvard and other Ivy League schools like to brag about how many presidents
Supreme Court Justices and Fortune 500 CEOs went to their schools and the best way for them to
maintain those bragging rights is to only educate people who their mission office thinks is likely
to go on to be a president Supreme Court Justice or Fortune 500 CEO if you can talk confidently and
provide proof to an admissions officer about how you have reshaped your industry you are a lot more
likely to get in you will also need to do the GMAT which is a test to assess your business acumen
if you seriously want to be a Fortune 500 CEO this is just one of many tests you would have taken
in your career so study hard and you should Ace it once you have received your MBA from
Harvard life should be pretty good for you the average salary of a Harvard MBA in their first
year after graduation is 207 000 and that figure should be significantly higher if you go back into
an industry where you already have executive experience your next goal is the c-suite and
to get there in a Fortune 500 company you're going to need to double down on that personal branding
at this level it is not unusual for individuals to hire the help of public relations consultant
to arrange for them to give speeches and appear in media so they are appealing to high-end recruiters
but also to company directors and shareholders who ultimately have the final say over who gets
to be the chief executive top CEOs do earn a lot of money and no they don't work 320 times
harder than the average worker but they do have the potential to make or lose investors a lot
more money than 320 regular employees ever could part of that is just brand ending if an executive
that the general public sees on the news every morning is announced as a new CEO of a company it
can boost the share price significantly the other side of that is if somebody that nobody has ever
heard of has announced then it will raise a lot of questions about who is leading the company even
if that person is just as technically competent as a person with a PR team behind them even if
you do absolutely everything right you still probably have about a one percent chance at
best at becoming the CEO of a Fortune 500 company but that's okay even if you stray away from this
exact path you are still going to be making a lot of money and working in a very exciting role but
it will come at a huge personal cost you have to decide if long hours for years on end are worth
it for the chance to have your salary ridiculed by every Congressman proposing a new tax bill because
oh yeah that's right if you do end up becoming the CEO of a public company your income will become
public record so if you wouldn't feel comfortable putting up your paycheck on Facebook maybe the
job isn't for you after all we enjoy the right to keep our personal finances private which makes you
wonder how we work out how rich the billionaires these CEOs will be working for actually are if you
want to find out frankly scary strategies that journalists use to work out how much someone
is worth to make their billionaires list go and watch my video on why net worth lists are complete
nonsense thanks again to Helix for making it possible to keep on learning how money works