Executive Excess 2026

The CEO with the nation’s largest number of workers on Medicaid and SNAP took home 958 times more than the retailer’s median pay.

For the country’s largest private sector employer, this past year was marked by a number of superlatives. During his final year in the post, Walmart CEO Doug McMillon raked in $29.2 million — the largest compensation package of his career.

Among Low-Wage 100 firms, the giant retailer ranked No. 1 in buyback spending in 2025. Walmart spent $8.1 billion on share repurchases — a sum that could have funded a $3,851 bonus for each of the firm’s 2.1 million employees. Instead, those buybacks helped pump up the value of McMillon’s equity-based pay.

Walmart, a company that has generated eight living billionaires (more than any Low-Wage 100 firm), also had the dubious distinction of ranking first in a new GAO report on employers with the most workers enrolled in Medicaid and SNAP. This is hardly a surprise, since half of the retailer’s employees make less than $30,520. In the states GAO studied, Walmart had 16,055 workers enrolled in Medicaid and 15,515 on SNAP.

Walmart executives have opted to not use their enormous economic and political clout to speak out about safety net cuts and aggressive ICE tactics that have affected their frontline employees. In one January 2026 incident, video captured masked ICE agents dragging a Walmart associate, Somali high school student Suban Noor, from her car in Willmar, Minnesota. Noor, who is in this country legally, was released after five days in an undisclosed detention center.

A billionaire CEO remains mute as ICE targets his low-wage “Dashers.”

The DoorDash IPO in December 2020 turned three of its co-founders into billionaires. The co-founder who currently serves as CEO, Tony Xu, earned the relatively modest sum of $431,864 in 2025, just 12 times as much as the company’s $36,373 median pay. It is not unusual for founder CEOs to accept only a nominal annual salary since their real wealth rests in their stock holdings.

If we consider the highest-paid DoorDash executive, not the CEO, a more accurate pay picture emerges. In 2025, that executive — chief operating officer, Prabir Adarkar — raked in compensation worth $15.7 million, 432 times the DoorDash median pay. But even that ratio downplays the true extent of DoorDash pay disparities.

The company’s reported median pay figure does not take into account “Dashers,” the drivers who actually deliver the food and are central to the company’s business model but are classified as “independent contractors.” More than nine million people “dashed” in 2025. Those workers combined earned a total of over $20 billion that year, a figure that works out to just $2,222 per employee. Gridwise Analytics estimates DoorDash driver hourly average earnings, including tips, at $12.43.

DoorDash leaders have remained silent as ICE agents have targeted their drivers — at times with violent attacks. In July 2026, an ICE agent in Maine fatally shot a Dasher who was authorized to work in the United States and was not the subject of the agent’s arrest order. Another ICE agent is facing criminal charges after he chased a DoorDash driver in Minneapolis and then fired through the door of a home, injuring a family member of the driver.

Additional ICE actions against DoorDash drivers have been reported in many other cities, including Nashville, San Diego, and Portland, Oregon. After a surge of incidents involving delivery drivers in Washington, D.C. in 2025, a DoorDash spokesperson told a local reporter that they had neither informed drivers of their constitutional rights nor given any guidance about what to do if they are detained.

The big-box retailer focuses on pumping up CEO pay while ICE terrorizes workers outside their doors.

In 2025, CEO Edward Decker’s compensation hit $16.2 million, 427 times the Home Depot median pay of $37,881. The home improvement chain has pumped up the value of Decker’s stock-based pay through massive share repurchases. Since 2019, Home Depot has blown $37.9 billion on buybacks, enough to have given all 472,400 Home Depot employees a $11,449 bonus every one of the past seven years.

Similar to DoorDash’s relationship with their “Dashers,” Home Depot claims to have no legal liability related to the day laborers who are key to the company’s business model because they offer inexpensive and flexible labor for the contractors that patronize the chain. After White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller reportedly told ICE agents to target these vulnerable workers, the agency carried out a wave of Home Depot raids in Los Angeles, Chicago, New Orleans, and other cities.

A letter signed by 25 members of Congress points out that raids at Home Depot and Lowe’s stores have included the arrests of U.S. citizens, physical altercations, dangerous vehicle pursuits, medical emergencies, injuries, and the detention of individuals attempting to document enforcement activity.

One day laborer was struck and killed when he ran onto a busy highway after fleeing a Home Depot raid in Monrovia, California. Corporate officials declined media requests to comment on the man’s death. Home Depot’s official line regarding these actions on their own property: we “aren’t notified that immigration enforcement activities are going to happen, and we aren’t involved in them.”

The world’s second-richest man remains silent as ICE targets his most vulnerable workers.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, like many corporate founders with enormous stock holdings, pocketed only nominal annual compensation during his years as CEO. As Amazon’s executive chair, he still collected just $1,681,840 in 2025, with all but $81,840 of that representing payment for his personal security expenses. Meanwhile, his staggering personal net worth has continued to explode. As of July 2026, the Forbes real-time tracker estimated Bezos’s wealth, nearly all of it in Amazon stock, at $254 billion, up by $33 billion over the past year.

In 2025, Amazon’s other named executives also received relatively small annual compensation packages because they had raked in multi-year mega-grants in recent years. CEO Andrew Jassy holds more than 2.3 million Amazon shares, currently worth $634 million. By contrast, median pay for Amazon workers stood at $40,206 last year, and the GAO ranked the company second after Walmart in the number of employees on Medicaid and SNAP. Amazon has used aggressive anti-union tactics to undercut workers’ efforts at several of their facilities to gain a fairer share of the company’s massive profits.

Like DoorDash, Amazon also classifies their gig workers, Amazon Flex drivers who deliver packages in their own vehicles, as “independent contractors.” The retail goliath has opted to not use their enormous political clout to defend these workers as they have faced aggressive ICE tactics in Seattle, Detroit, and elsewhere. One incident in Michigan prompted local elected officials to denounce ICE for detaining two Amazon Flex drivers from Venezuela who have protected status as asylum seekers. Amazon has also resisted calls to end their cloud service contracts with ICE.

Once a diversity and inclusion advocate, the Target CEO ended his tenure as a wealthy man with a tainted record on social justice.

Target CEO Brian Cornell hauled in $21.8 million in 2025 — 794 times as much as the company’s median pay of $27,506. With wages that low, it’s no surprise that a GAO report of select states found that thousands of Target employees are having to rely on Medicaid and SNAP food assistance to get by.

But low wages weren’t the only challenge for Target employees over the past year. During the unprecedented surge of federal immigration forces in the company’s hometown of Minneapolis, agents appeared to place the big box retailer in their crosshairs. They intimidated employees and customers by staging their vehicles in Target parking lots, entering stores in groups wearing masks and carrying lethal weapons, and arresting employees.

On January 8, 2026, ICE agents wrestled two Latino employees — both U.S. citizens — to the ground at a suburban Minneapolis Target store and shoved them into an unmarked SUV. About two hours later, they dumped the men out in a parking lot in another town. Target officials declined to comment on these incidents of ICE targeting its employees. And when a pastor managed to get CEO Cornell on the phone during a faith leader sit-in at company headquarters on January 15, he hung up on her.

Target did later endorse an open letter with other Minnesota-based firms broadly calling for “deescalation of tensions and for state, local and federal officials to work together.” But Cornell’s handling of the ICE crisis further tarnished the reputation he had once sought to cultivate as a socially conscientious CEO.

In the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder by police in Minneapolis in 2020, Cornell became one of corporate America’s most forceful supporters of diversity and inclusion initiatives. The company pledged to increase its Black workforce by 20 percent over three years, spend more than $2 billion to support Black-owned businesses, and contribute $100 million to support Black-led nonprofits and provide scholarships to students attending historically Black colleges and universities.

Target quickly abandoned these DEI initiatives in the face of opposition from the second Trump administration, provoking a sustained boycott that company leaders acknowledge has contributed to declining sales. Cornell transitioned from Target CEO to Executive Chairman on February 1, 2026.

The discount retailer instructs its store managers to allow ICE to question employees.

Dollar General CEO Todd Vascos raked in $8.2 million in 2025 — 432 times as much as the company’s median pay. Half of the discount retailer’s employees make less than $18,876. GAO analysis of six states found that Dollar General had 5,601 employees enrolled in Medicaid in those states. In nine states, Dollar General had 5,197 employees receiving SNAP benefits.

Since the beginning of Trump’s second term, Dollar General employees have had to struggle with both poverty wages and pressure from management to cooperate with ICE. In January 2025, Dollar General’s top management sent a memo to store managers at their more than 20,000 stores on what to do if ICE agents enter a store and want to interrogate employees.

“Please allow the agent to speak with the employee,” the Dollar General memo instructed. “Ask the Agent to meet with the employee outside the store and away from customers and other employees if possible.”

Pressuring managers to subject employees to ICE interrogation undermines the constitutional right to refuse to speak with enforcement agents. In fact, the National Immigration Law Center advises employers to train their staff to not talk to agents to protect against self-incrimination. The Center also points out that if an ICE agent presents an administrative warrant with an employee’s name on it, managers are not required to take the agent to the named employee or even to say if that employee is working on that day.