Get Your Pitchforks. Woke CEOs Are Way Overpaid.

If you’re like most Americans, you’re probably feeling the pinch of higher prices. Energy is rising, food is rising, housing is rising. 

By all accounts, the cost of living will be the decisive factor in the upcoming elections, as it was in 2024 and 2022, and has been in nearly every national election worldwide since the pandemic. Inflation and a declining quality of life for many Americans have been defining issues of this decade. 

One group that isn’t feeling the pinch: America’s CEOs. Together, they’ve managed to weather the storm quite well. I’m going to ask something you don’t often hear from commentators on the Right: are these CEOs really worth $50 million a year? Is that possible? 

Let’s consider United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby. Here’s a photo of him: 

Kirby is, in many ways, the perfect embodiment of America’s CEO class. He took a company in decline, in an industry notorious for degradation, and somehow made the experience worse. Last June, the company went viral when a passenger posted this picture of a meal in business class on a flight from Barcelona to Chicago. Take a look:

Source: Reddit

If you also want to try the rubber chicken United is serving in business class, you can book a ticket on that route right now for about $5,000. Since taking the reins at United, Kirby has turned the in-flight experience into an ordeal that would, in a perfect world, be prohibited by the Geneva Convention. 

But making the airline worse isn’t Kirby’s only accomplishment as CEO. One year after taking his position, he announced a new United Airlines flight school, saying “our plan is for half of them to be women and people of color.” 

For Kirby, it’s not enough to make you suffer on board. He wants to train unqualified pilots, hired exclusively because of their sex and color, so that eventually he can endanger the lives of his customers too. This, of course, is a quota system that precisely zero United Airlines passengers have ever demanded, requested, or desired in any way, presumably because they value their lives. 

Even after years of relentless DEI brainwashing, every passenger on every plane in America instinctively feels a wave of relief when they see that their pilot is a white guy in his 50s with a mustache. Some people — not me — might feel ashamed for having felt that relief, but we all feel it. 

CHECK OUT THE DAILY WIRE MIDTERM HUB

One of the other major problems with United is that they have a lot of delays that Kirby has done nothing to improve. To be fair, a large part of the issue is that they have a hub at Newark, which is an airport that has the look and smell and general unpleasantness of a giant football stadium-sized porta potty. Granted, it’s in New Jersey, which is the porta potty of states. 

In any case, through it all, how much is this drag-dressing, comically incompetent moron actually worth? Well, his total compensation last year was $32.3 million, which comes out to $124,230 per workday. 

If Scott Kirby were a self-respecting person, he’d quit his job in humiliation and shame. He’d go into retirement or hiding, and never return to corporate America. But Scott Kirby isn’t doing that. Instead, he’s finding ways to bring even more shame on the name of United Airlines. It seems unthinkable. It should be impossible to do anything that makes United Airlines look worse than it already does. That’s like doing something to further ruin the reputation of Osama bin Laden, or head lice, or Canada. How can it possibly be done?

Well, Scott Kirby has found a way. Recently, he’s started doing interviews, issuing the usual meaningless platitudes, and pulling up the ladder for everyone else. This is courtesy of Fox Business: 

United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby is calling for a national wealth tax and inheritance taxes approaching 100% for certain estates, arguing that growing wealth inequality poses a threat to American society. Kirby, who took home about $32.3 million in total compensation in fiscal year 2025, made the remarks when asked about declining public trust in corporate executives … ‘Wealth inequality has become a danger to our society, and we need to address that,’ Kirby [said]. … The airline executive argued that a wealth tax would need to be implemented nationwide rather than at the state level to prevent wealthy Americans from relocating to avoid paying it.

Now the thing about Scott Kirby is, he didn’t actually build anything. He started his career as a budget analyst for the Pentagon, which — notably — has never passed an audit, and has an annual budget of something like a thousand trillion dollars, give or take, and yet always needs more money. He rose quickly by jumping from failing airline to failing airline, like a plague of locusts, before finally failing up to his current job at United, where somehow he’s worth about 30 times more per year than the average American will make in a lifetime. 

Remarkably, one of the things he’s focused on in the last year is pulling coach seats from his airplanes and expanding the premium cabins. So Scott Kirby has no problem at all making it harder for middle-class families to afford flying.  

If you want to know why socialism is on the rise in America, look no further than Scott Kirby. And that’s why he’s on TV, promoting hypothetical taxes and voicing the same banalities and platitudes that he hopes will keep him safe when the pitchforks come. 

 We know it’s nothing but platitudes because the Treasury website includes a link where you can voluntarily give the government money in addition to what you owe in taxes. If Scott Kirby means what he says, surely he’ll go there right now and donate. Scott, you don’t need more than $2 million a year, do you? But of course Scott Kirby, who’s built nothing, will not do that. Instead, he wants to make sure that the millionaire owner of your local excavation company — who built everything himself — can’t hand anything down to his kids. It’s interesting how this works. 

The reason Kirby is doing this is not that he believes what he’s saying. Instead, what he’s actually interested in doing is finding some way to stave off the rampaging communist hordes that are threatening to take control of the government in a few years and are intent on destroying the economy. He thinks that, if corporate executives start talking about “taxing the rich,” then maybe the communists will be nicer to him. Maybe they won’t nationalize his airline. Maybe they won’t raise the corporate tax rate to 100%. Maybe they won’t gun him down in the streets of New York and celebrate his murder all over Reddit, as they did to the UnitedHealthcare CEO. 

It’s a desperation play. It’s a sign of weakness. And of course, if and when the communists do take control, all of these gestures will mean absolutely nothing to them. They’ll seize his airline, confiscate his wealth, and throw him in prison, or off a cliff, and think nothing of it. 

The best-case scenario for Scott Kirby in the event of a communist takeover is that he escapes like Alexander Kerensky, who also tried to make 11th-hour amends with the Bolsheviks immediately before they took over. Of course, none of this would really matter for us, because at the end of the day, Kirby is just a bureaucrat running a crappy airline in a failing industry. 

Unfortunately, guys like Kirby making an unreasonable amount of money in exchange for nothing does have implications for us. That’s why it’s important for conservatives to acknowledge that, while highly productive, entrepreneurial, impressive innovators need to be rewarded for their work, it’s also true that in modern DEI-oriented corporate America, highly productive, entrepreneurial, impressive innovators only become CEO if they build the company themselves. 

It’s very important to distinguish between idiots like Kirby — who, should he disappear tomorrow, would be replaced by a corporate drone just like him, and nothing at all would change at the company or in the world — and innovators like Elon Musk or Jensen Huang. 

When talentless corporate hacks who have achieved nothing nonetheless make tens of millions a year, it breeds resentment. And honestly, it should. 

What’s interesting about what’s unfolding right now is that Democrats actually seem to prefer corporate shills like Kirby. Remarkably, they’re targeting the innovators. The same day Elon Musk debuted a flying car, Bernie Sanders called for the abolition of trillionaires. Really? Elon Musk — the last American who’s truly innovating at scale — is the problem? 

This, in and of itself, is extremely revealing. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren will gush endlessly about how horrible Elon Musk is, but they’ll never mention the moronic CEOs who are looting the carcasses of once-great companies they somehow control today, but could never have built. And it’s not just Scott Kirby. 

One CEO you never hear Bernie Sanders talk about is General Motors’ Mary Barra, a former HR executive turned CEO. In fact, Barra has been celebrated as a role model by liberals like Hillary Clinton, who once claimed Barra broke the “steel ceiling” by becoming CEO of a manufacturing company. So how valuable is Mary Barra? 

 Well, last year, Toyota’s CEO made $6 million. VW’s CEO made $8 million. General Motors’ CEO Mary Barra made $48 million. 

“Now wait a second,” you might be asking. “What did she do at General Motors that made her worth 8 times Toyota’s CEO and 6 times VW’s?” After all, Toyota is a much more successful company, according to every objective financial, strategic, and operational metric you can think of. Toyota is worth three times General Motors’ market cap. Toyota is dramatically more profitable (generating more than $24 billion annually, compared to GM’s $6 billion). Toyota sells far more cars than GM — something like 4 million more, every year. And Toyota never needed any government bailout. They never had to declare bankruptcy.

So what has Mary Barra done? Well, she oversaw a failed transition to electric vehicles that cost GM more than $6 billion in write-offs. She oversaw the release of the 6.2-liter V8 engine that is bricking Tahoes and Suburbans nationwide right now and is currently the subject of a federal investigation. Industry insiders describe it as a “total disaster.” She’s laid off more than 20,000 workers, mostly Americans, and often during the holidays. 

Bernie Sanders and Ro Khanna will demand that Elon Musk be forced, at gunpoint, to sell his shares in his companies (which is where virtually all of his wealth comes from). They’ll demonize him at every opportunity. Tim Walz will go on stage and celebrate when Tesla stock drops. Meanwhile, Mary Barra is barely mentioned, if she’s mentioned at all. I’m about as far from a Bernie Sanders communist as it gets, but I have to admit, the sheer amount of money this woman is earning — given her contributions to the company, or total lack thereof — is truly hard to comprehend. 

Forty-eight million a year is nearly 700 times the average U.S. salary, which means that the average person in the U.S. would have to work for 700 years, or about 8 lifetimes, to earn what this woman makes in one single year. Even as CEOs of other giant car companies — companies significantly more successful than her own — make a fraction of what she makes. 

Think about this. Toyota’s far more successful, but the CEO doesn’t get anywhere near as much compensation. It’s very similar to the situation with Boeing a few years back, when the CEO received a massive golden parachute worth tens of millions of dollars after overseeing the disastrous back-to-back crashes of the MAX airplanes, which were totally preventable. Boeing’s incompetence caused those crashes. Meanwhile, Airbus’ CEO — who didn’t oversee any crashes — received around one-third of the Boeing CEO’s compensation.

Even the most rabidly pro-free market capitalist cannot honestly defend what Mary Barra is making. And quite frankly, we shouldn’t have to. Conservatives should be honest and acknowledge the role people like Barra play in driving up the demand for socialism. 

But Mary Barra gets to keep her job anyway, because she’s the product of a corporate environment that rewards gender more than competence. It cannot be stressed enough that Mary Barra is not a builder. She’s not an entrepreneur. She’s not a shrewd businesswoman. She has no skills. She’s done nothing. She’s achieved nothing. 

She was put in charge of a massive multi-billion-dollar company — she didn’t grow it to that point, or have anything to do with growing it. And all that has happened under her regime is that the company has become worse at everything, in every way. The criticisms the Left makes against millionaire CEOs actually apply to someone like Mary Barra. 

She does not remotely deserve the salary she’s getting paid. She is, in effect, a kind of welfare case. And yet she is precisely the kind of CEO the Left will not single out. Instead, they single out Elon Musk, who is, in every conceivable sense, the exact opposite of Mary Barra. He is an actual builder and innovator. Mary Barra wouldn’t even have a job if she were a man, and everyone knows it. The company became completely woke when it was popular to do it. They’re now falling apart. But the woman in charge is rewarded with glowing profiles from various left-wing outlets, while GM employees lose everything.

That’s not to single out GM. Pretty much every recognizable major corporation is like this. When Chrysler announced the Jeep Grand Cherokee in 1992, the highly politically incorrect president Bob Lutz drove the SUV straight through a glass window at the North American International Auto Show. Whatever American spirit that was is now gone in corporate America. 

Even Apple, one of the biggest companies on the planet, has spent the last decade doing absolutely nothing. They’ve invented a pregnant man emoji, and that’s about it. Every new product from Apple is just the iPhone again but in a slightly different form. Here’s the iPhone attached to your wrist. Here’s the iPhone on a little stand on the kitchen counter. Meanwhile, this is McDonald’s CEO, famously trying to sell his company’s latest burger, which he describes not as a “burger” but as a “product,” with all the enthusiasm of a prisoner of war being forced to eat the banana rice in Somalia:

That’s got to be the smallest possible bite he could’ve taken. And even that one little bite of the “Big Arch” sandwich almost makes him puke. That’s not even the worst part, which is how obviously robotic and inauthentic the whole scene was. It’s like telling ChatGPT to talk about eating a hamburger. 

Somehow this guy wasn’t fired over this, even though he went on camera and made it abundantly clear that he hates the product his company is selling. He’s viscerally disgusted by McDonald’s food, but McDonald’s is still happy to pay him $20 million a year — which I guess is fitting, because it’s $1 million for each percentage point the stock has declined in the past year.

People now see this happening at every major corporation. And they justifiably think it’s unfair and makes no sense. 

The primary reason that America never became communist or socialist is that for most of its history, rich people felt something called noblesse oblige. They cared about the well-being of the country and the people in it. They voluntarily made an effort to improve the country, since the country made it possible for them to get rich in the first place. 

The most famous example of this is the steel baron Andrew Carnegie. He voluntarily gave away 90% of his fortune, funding more than 2,500 libraries across the United States, along with Carnegie Hall in New York and the Carnegie Institute of Technology, which became Carnegie Mellon. He created a fund for civilians who saved other people’s lives, created endowments and foundations to promote teaching, scientific research, and peace. He even paid for more than 7,000 Church organs. He wrote a book called the “Gospel of Wealth” in which he wrote, “The best means of benefiting the community is to place within its reach the ladders upon which the aspiring can rise.” He believed that the “proper administration of wealth” would “bind together the rich and poor in harmonious relationship.”

Around the turn of the 20th century, these views were actually popular in America. After the Civil War, the banker George Peabody built schools throughout the American South. John D. Rockefeller was responsible for eliminating hookworm. Julius Rosenwald of Sears Corporation built 5,000 schools for black children in the South. Henry Ford wasn’t laying off workers and building defective vehicles like Mary Barra. Instead, he was paying line workers enough that they could afford the cars they were making. He was the first to do so. 

The small mill town of Rumford, Maine, perfectly embodies how this used to work. It has a Carnegie library across the street from “Strathglass Park,” which is full of high-end company housing for workers from the local paper mill. The mill owner, Hugh Chisholm, took so much pride in what he was building that he hired an architect to build the company housing — but not just any architect, the same guy who designed the Supreme Court and the Woolworth building. It’s still there today. You can go look at it. Just blocks away is a “Mechanics Institute,” also conceived by Chisholm and paid for by the local mill so that there would be a “space for working people to improve themselves mentally, morally, socially and physically for a low cost.” 

That was corporate America roughly a century ago, back when the elites actually cared about their workers. These were the attitudes and practices that prevented a socialist revolution in America. 

Imagine if Mary Barra, rather than taking in nearly $50 million in compensation, built a community center, a library, and hired a talented architect to build housing for her workers. But of course, she’s not doing that. She’s laying them off and replacing them with AI. Good luck to her when the revolution comes. 

Recently, an inebriated Indiana Democrat named Jaime West drunkenly made a point about how tech companies should have to invest in the community before building data centers. That is totally correct and the kind of thing Republicans would be insane for opposing. Why shouldn’t a company worth a zillion dollars be required to meaningfully invest in a community where they want to build their infrastructure? 

If you’re a town manager or a county bureaucrat and you’re reading this, before you agree to let wind turbines or solar panels or data centers come to your town, you need to shake down those companies for every cent you can get out of them. Build yourself a mechanics institute and hire an award-winning architect to do it. Though most people don’t realize it, America is richer today than it was a century ago, so there’s no reason they can’t do it. Somewhere at the top is someone like Mary Barra or Scott Kirby. Surely they can afford to pay for it. 

10 years ago, the corporate class was much more interested in “social governance scores” and donating to the vast black hole of inner-city non-profits. Today, they’re not even interested in that. What we’re seeing now from our AI overlords — including Sam Altman and people like him — is the idea that, in the future, no one will have a job and we’ll all be completely dependent on Big Tech. This is a representative post from someone calling himself a “futurist,” for example:

 2 years from now you will not work you and will not worry about money. you will get your cash payments from all the major AI labs. think of it like 3-5 companies giving you a thousand dollar check every week.

So the AI companies in the near future will give us all stipends, and we’ll all basically become dependents of Sam Altman. This is supposed to be an optimistic vision of the future? Actually, it’s deeply horrifying — and it’s not what we mean when we say that these CEOs should be contributing to humanity. This sounds like a dystopian nightmare. I do not want to live off of handouts from my Big Tech overlords. 

The fact that anyone sees this as some heavenly vision of the future is extremely depressing. Living as serfs with our hands out, waiting for our stipend from our Big Tech sugar daddies, is not the kind of future we should be trying to build for ourselves and our children.

There is another way. It involves providing the right incentives and giving people a clear sense of the stakes. In that case, support for socialism will plummet. We can’t do anything to change the minds of the Somalis and the other foreign scammers who have come here to plunder our treasury — all we can do with them is deport them, and we should — but we can absolutely reverse the trend we’re seeing among native-born Americans, who are now entertaining the single most destructive ideology the West has ever seen, in record numbers. 

We can root for the guy who’s building flying cars and catching rockets in mid-air, instead of the 85-year-old whiny socialist from Vermont. We can return to the sense of genuine excitement for the future, which was so dominant in this country in the middle of the 20th century, when people were thrilled by everything from moon landings to shopping malls. 

That is objectively a much better place for the United States to be. And in the long run, it’s also a much better outcome for even the most useless CEOs — the Scott Kirbys and the Mary Barras of the world. 

Under their system, the CEOs get sent to the gallows. Under our system, the CEOs invest a fraction of their company’s vast wealth to help create a country with many more Elon Musks, and as few Scott Kirbys and Mary Barras as possible. 

As it turns out, Elon Musk — America’s innovator-in-chief, apparently — understands that what we urgently need, at this point, is for noblesse oblige to make a comeback. That is an idea which has long since fallen out of favor: that is, the rich and powerful have a basic responsibility to act honorably and generously, and to care about, and meaningfully invest in, the future of the nation. This is not a government policy. It’s not something to be achieved through taxation. It is a basic expectation of honorable behavior. An expectation that, of course, should fall on everyone, of any income bracket, in one form or another.

The point is not that the richest Americans — the ones with an enormous amount of equity in the largest companies on the planet — should give handouts. They shouldn’t. Instead, they should actually invest, in a meaningful way, in the future of the country. Not because the government forces them to do it, but because they actually care about the future of the country. And it’s not like they need to be driven by pure virtue and charity to care. If the country has no future, neither do their companies. So this is just a matter of rational long-term planning. Elon just announced his own plan to do exactly that: 

As it stands today, a share of SpaceX isn’t worth much — only around $150. But if you give a child a share of SpaceX today, it will almost certainly be worth much, much more by the time he’s 18 — and certainly by the time he retires. By Musk’s estimates — which are admittedly optimistic — that share could be worth more than $7,000 within the next decade. 

That’s the best way to prevent a Bolshevik takeover in this country. Voluntarily end the comically absurd pay packages, and give Americans a stake in the success of the American economy. Elon Musk has started this campaign. Now every CEO who wants their company to exist in 20 years — and who doesn’t want their children to live under Bolshevik rule for the next century — should follow suit.

The moral of the story is that it’s very important for builders and creators like Elon and Jensen Huang to get rich. That’s how the system is supposed to work. Those are CEOs who took on extraordinary risk and built massive corporations from the ground up. Elon just unveiled a flying car, which we’re supposed to be angry about. 

Bernie Sanders has never created a single job in his life. He’s never had an original or worthwhile thought. He’s never done anything remotely interesting or inspiring. But he wants to destroy what Elon built, because if people see Elon doing amazing things, then they might realize the government is wasting their money. And then the whole scam falls apart.

Elon deserves his money because he’s actually creating meaningful new products, including self-driving technology, that people can use on a day-to-day basis. There’s no question he deserves his net worth — which, by the way, is not stored in some bank vault. His net worth comes from his stock in Tesla and SpaceX.

If any American wants a share in that wealth, and to see the same gains (and losses) that Elon sees, they can just buy the stock as well. They’re publicly traded. This is how it’s supposed to work.

Ultimately, the goal is to create a lot more Elons and no more Mary Barras.

We need to be a country that facilitates and rewards builders and innovators again. That’s the best way to prevent the coming socialist revolution.

In fact, it’s the only way.