Why Do People Hate CEOs?
Record profits. Mass layoffs. AI replacement theater. A folk hero in handcuffs. The chief executive class earned every ounce of contempt aimed at it — and Gen Z has noticed.
On December 4, 2024, a 26-year-old in a hooded jacket walked up behind the CEO of America’s largest health insurer outside a Manhattan hotel and shot him in the back. Within hours, the internet was not in mourning. It was cheering.
That moment — the moment millions of Americans saw a chief executive murdered on camera and felt something closer to relief than horror — was not the start of anything. It was a reading on a gauge that had been climbing for years. The needle had finally hit the red zone. And the country, particularly the part of the country under thirty, decided to stop pretending.
So let’s stop pretending. Let’s talk about why people hate CEOs.
The Pay Gap Is Not a Statistic. It’s a Confession.
In 1965, the average S&P 500 CEO took home roughly 21 times the pay of a typical worker. By 2024, that ratio was 281 to 1, according to the Economic Policy Institute’s September 2025 report. CEO realized compensation grew 1,094 percent from 1978 to 2024. Typical worker pay grew 26 percent. Net productivity grew 80 percent. The math is not subtle. The workers built the value. Somebody else walked off with it.
Drill into the worst offenders and the numbers stop being numbers and start being insults. The Institute for Policy Studies’ Executive Excess 2025 report tracked the hundred lowest-paying firms in the S&P 500 — the “Low-Wage 100.” Average CEO pay in 2024: $17.2 million. Average median worker pay: $35,570. Average ratio: 632 to 1. Starbucks set the all-time record at 6,666 to 1: CEO Brian Niccol pocketed $95.8 million while the median barista pulled $14,674. A barista would need to work 6,600 years to earn what Niccol earned in twelve months.
Oxfam and the International Trade Union Confederation reported in April 2026 that U.S. CEO pay grew twenty times faster than worker wages in the past year. Inflation-adjusted private-sector wages grew 1.3 percent. CEO earnings at the 384 S&P 500 firms that disclosed pay grew 25.6 percent. While 65 percent of American consumers told J.D. Power that prices were outpacing their income, the people setting those prices gave themselves a raise twenty times bigger than the people paying them.
This is not a market outcome. Markets do not reward labor at 26 percent while rewarding executives at 1,094 percent for the same work over the same decades. This is power, dressed up as performance, billed as merit, and rubber-stamped by boards staffed by other CEOs returning the favor.
The Profitable Layoff: “We’re Doing Great. You’re Fired.”
If pay disparity is the disease, the profitable layoff is the symptom that finally became visible to everyone.
Meta announced in April 2026 it was cutting 8,000 jobs — 10 percent of its workforce — effective May 20. Full-year 2025 revenue: $201 billion. Q4 2025 net income alone: $22.8 billion. The company is not laying people off because it cannot afford them. Meta’s chief people officer, Janelle Gale, wrote in a memo (leaked before it was meant to be public) that the cuts were “part of our continued effort to run the company more efficiently and to allow us to offset the other investments we’re making.” Those “investments” are $115 billion to $135 billion in 2026 capital expenditure, almost entirely for AI data centers, Nvidia GPUs, and Meta Superintelligence Labs.
Amazon cut roughly 16,000 corporate roles in Q1 2026 while reporting AWS growth of 24 percent — its fastest in thirteen quarters. Microsoft offered voluntary buyouts to about 8,750 U.S. employees, the first such program in its 51-year history, and laid off around 15,000 in 2025 on top of that. Intel cut more than 27,000. Salesforce’s Marc Benioff explained the elimination of 4,000 customer-support roles with three words: “I need less heads.”
Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta together plan to spend $725 billion on capital expenditures in 2026 — up 77 percent from an already-record $410 billion in 2025. Since 2020, nearly 900,000 tech workers have been laid off globally per Layoffs.fyi. Over 92,000 in 2026 alone, as of late April. The story is no longer ambiguous. The companies are saying it out loud. Oracle said it was cutting jobs to build AI data centers. Meta said it was cutting jobs to offset AI spending. They are not running out of money. They are choosing machines over people, on the record, and asking the people to be polite about it.
They are not running out of money. They are choosing machines over people — on the record.
The AI Replacement Bluff (And Why It’s Still Devastating)
The funny thing about the great AI replacement is that, so far, the AI has not actually been good enough. Klarna’s CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski spent 2024 bragging that the company’s AI assistant did the work of 700 customer-service agents and that the headcount had been slashed from 5,527 to 3,422. In 2025, Klarna quietly admitted “we went too far” — the AI’s “lower quality” responses had damaged customer trust — and started hiring humans again.
Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn told employees in April 2025 the company was “AI-first” and would “gradually stop using contractors to do work AI can handle.” Five weeks later, after a public-relations bonfire on TikTok (“mama may I have real people running the company,” read one viral comment), he backtracked on LinkedIn: “To be clear: I do not see AI as replacing what our employees do.” Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke’s leaked memo demanded teams “prove why certain jobs can’t be done using AI” before any new hires. He has not walked it back.
Here is the part that doesn’t get said clearly enough. Even when the AI does not actually work, the announcement does the damage. Wages are suppressed. Hiring freezes are justified. Severance is normalized. New graduates are told the entry-level rung has been pulled up. The CEO does not need the AI to be good; he needs the threat of the AI to be credible to the board and the labor market. The bluff is the product. The people lose their jobs either way.
Offshoring 2.0: They’re Not Hiding It Anymore
And when AI cannot do the job and the CEO still wants the cost line down, there is always the older trick: send the work somewhere cheaper. In 2025, U.S. Big Tech companies hired roughly 33,000 additional workers in India — about an 18 percent increase year-over-year. Amazon committed $35 billion to India through the decade. Microsoft committed $17.5 billion. India already holds half the world’s workforce in Global Capacity Centers — about 2 million employees doing not call-center work but software engineering, finance, legal operations, analytics, AI research.
Bloomberg’s analysis suggests roughly half of AI-attributed layoffs result in the same roles being rehired offshore at lower salaries. Translation: a meaningful slice of the “AI layoffs” you’ve been reading about are not AI layoffs at all. They are labor arbitrage with a smarter cover story. The CEO gets the productivity-narrative tailwind, the wage line drops, the board claps, and an engineer in Bangalore does the same job for 50 to 70 percent less. The American who lost the job is told they failed to adapt.
Simon Sinek Wrote the Manual. They Threw It Out.
Simon Sinek’s 2014 book Leaders Eat Last is built on a single idea borrowed from the U.S. Marine Corps: leaders go through the chow line last, and if there is not enough food, leaders are the ones who go hungry. Sinek argues that great organizations build what he calls a Circle of Safety — an environment of trust, belonging, and mutual protection that allows people to focus their energy outward, at real threats and opportunities, instead of inward, at protecting themselves from each other and from leadership.
When the Circle of Safety breaks, Sinek warns, oxytocin and dopamine balance gives way to chronic cortisol. People stop sharing information. They withhold ideas. They protect themselves. Innovation collapses. Loyalty evaporates. The organization eats itself. Sinek used Wall Street firms and Nokia as cautionary examples of leadership that pitted employees against each other while the executive tier insulated itself.
Now look at the modern American CEO and ask whether Sinek’s diagnosis describes them or contradicts them. Layoffs announced via leaked memo. Severance handed out the same week as record earnings. Public statements that the workforce is essentially a cost center waiting to be automated. AI bluffs designed to suppress wages. Offshoring designed to be invisible until somebody’s badge stops working.
Leaders eat last? No. The current generation of chief executives eats first, eats most, and pulls the table away when the rest of the team sits down. Sinek’s circle of safety isn’t merely absent. It has been inverted into a circle of expendability.
This Isn’t Capitalism. It’s Monopoly with Better Branding.
Here is where the conversation usually gets confused, and where Gen Z’s instincts are right even when its vocabulary is not. The system Americans currently live under is not capitalism in any sense that Adam Smith would recognize. Capitalism, in theory, depends on competition — many sellers, many buyers, low barriers to entry, prices set by the meeting of supply and demand. What Americans actually face is a sector-by-sector landscape of oligopolies and effective monopolies, in which a handful of dominant firms set the terms and consumers have no exit.
Bruno Pellegrino’s award-winning research at the University of Maryland documented that American markets have steadily concentrated into oligopolies, with deadweight losses to consumers growing year over year. The Institute for Local Self-Reliance puts it bluntly: corporate concentration is at levels not seen since before the Great Depression. Airlines: four carriers control most domestic routes. Health insurance: a handful of companies dominate every state. Pharmacy: three pharmacy-benefit managers control roughly 80 percent of prescription claims. Search: one company. Mobile operating systems: two. Cloud infrastructure: three. Wireless carriers: three. Eyeglasses: one company (Luxottica) owns most of the brands you’ve heard of and most of the chains you’ve shopped at. Meat processing: four companies own about 85 percent of the beef market.
This matters because the standard libertarian rebuttal to corporate abuse — “don’t like it, take your business elsewhere” — depends on there being an elsewhere. There is not. You cannot meaningfully boycott your health insurer when your employer chose it. You cannot boycott Ticketmaster. You cannot boycott your regional power utility. You cannot boycott the three credit bureaus that decide whether you get a mortgage. You cannot boycott Comcast in a city Comcast paid to keep competitors out of. Exit is the consumer’s only real leverage in a market economy, and exit has been engineered out of most of the markets Americans actually depend on.
And then there is price. When monopolies and oligopolies raise prices in lockstep, economists used to call that collusion. Now it’s called “algorithmic pricing” or “shareholder value optimization,” and the same outcome is treated as efficient. Insulin prices. Concert tickets. Egg prices. Streaming subscriptions that just announced their fourth annual hike. Grocery margins that doubled while shoppers were told it was inflation. The pattern is consistent. It is not a free market. It is rent extraction with PR.
Exit is the consumer’s only real leverage in a market economy. Exit has been engineered out of most of the markets Americans actually depend on.
The Mangione Moment: A Country Stopped Pretending
Brian Thompson was 50 years old, a father of two, and the CEO of UnitedHealthcare — the insurance arm of UnitedHealth Group, the largest health insurer in the United States. He was walking to an investor conference at the Hilton Midtown the morning of December 4, 2024, when Luigi Mangione allegedly shot him in the back. Shell casings recovered from the scene were inscribed with the words “delay,” “deny,” and “depose” — the three verbs activists use to describe how health insurers handle claims.
Thompson’s compensation in 2023, per UnitedHealth’s own proxy filing: about $10.2 million. UnitedHealth Group’s revenue that year: over $370 billion. Net income: north of $22 billion. In 2024, the company hit $400 billion in revenue and $14.4 billion in net income. According to a KFF analysis of Affordable Care Act plan data, UnitedHealthcare denied about 33 percent of in-network claims across twenty states in 2023 — one of the highest rates in the industry, against an industry average of roughly 19 percent.
Then came the reaction, and the reaction is the part the country is still trying to understand. An Emerson College poll in mid-December 2024 found 41 percent of voters under 30 considered the killing “acceptable” — more than the 40 percent of that age group who called it unacceptable. A Generation Lab survey of 1,026 college students found 48 percent viewed the killing as totally or somewhat justified, and 45 percent sympathized more with Mangione than with Thompson. A CloudResearch poll: 27 percent of all U.S. adults expressed moderate or significant sympathy for the alleged killer, 12 percent supported the decision outright. NORC at the University of Chicago: about 70 percent of American adults believed health insurance profits or coverage denials bore at least a moderate amount of responsibility for Thompson’s death.
The comment threads were worse, or better, depending on where you stood. People posted obituaries of family members who had died after UnitedHealthcare denied coverage for chemotherapy, for surgery, for transplants, for ventilator support. Mothers wrote about adolescents denied mental-health stays. Adult children wrote about parents whose prior-authorization paperwork outlived their parents. People said, in plain language, that they were not sad. Some said they were glad. They tagged the company. They named the executives. They linked the obituaries. And the internet, instead of recoiling, agreed.
A society does not produce that response by accident. It produces that response because a critical mass of citizens has come to believe — rightly or wrongly — that a particular industry kills people for money and is shielded from every other form of accountability. The killing was a horror. The cheering was a verdict. And the verdict was on a system in which 33 percent denial rates and $10 million CEO packages and $22 billion in profits coexist with families being told their child’s treatment is not medically necessary.
Luigi Mangione is not a hero. Murder is not a policy proposal. But anyone in a boardroom who looked at that polling and thought the problem was rhetoric — instead of the conditions that made the rhetoric land — is not equipped to govern anything, including their own company.
Gen Z Is Right About the Problem and Wrong About the Cure
A 2025 Cato Institute/YouGov survey found that 62 percent of Americans aged 18 to 29 hold a favorable view of socialism. Thirty-four percent hold a favorable view of communism — roughly 18 million people. A Harvard Youth Poll from spring 2025 found just 15 percent of young people believed the country was heading in the right direction. Gallup’s tracking shows that the share of young adults with a positive view of capitalism has fallen from roughly two-thirds fifteen years ago to under half today.
This is where the older generations and the columnists have been getting it backwards. Gen Z is not rejecting capitalism. Gen Z is rejecting the thing that has been sold to them as capitalism and is in fact monopoly capture, regulatory capture, and rentier extraction wearing a capitalist costume. When 62 percent of young Americans say they want “socialism,” most of them, when you push them, are describing universal healthcare, debt relief, antitrust enforcement, a real minimum wage, housing they can actually afford, and CEOs who do not pay themselves 6,666 times the median worker. They are not describing the nationalization of industry. They are describing a market economy that actually behaves like one.
The problem is that they don’t know that’s what they’re describing. The vocabulary has been so degraded by a half-century of cable-news arguments that “socialism” has become a catch-all for “the current system is unfair, and the alternative I want, whatever it’s called, isn’t this.” That ambiguity is dangerous. Because if you pull too hard on the rope marked “socialism” without understanding what’s actually tied to the other end, you don’t end up with Scandinavian-style competitive markets and a strong safety net. You end up with the centralized planning, scarcity, and political repression that produced the boat people, the Berlin Wall, and the Venezuelan grocery line.
Gen Z is correct that the current system is rigged. Gen Z is correct that the chief executive class has betrayed the social contract. Gen Z is correct that the labor market is structurally hostile to new entrants. Gen Z is incorrect when it concludes that the answer is to abolish markets. The answer is to make markets actually competitive again — to do what Teddy Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt did when faced with a comparable concentration of corporate power. Break up the trusts. Tax the rent-extractors. Enforce the antitrust laws that are still on the books. Restore the conditions that make capitalism produce the prosperity it’s supposed to produce instead of the extraction it currently produces.
Gen Z is not rejecting capitalism. Gen Z is rejecting the thing that has been sold to them as capitalism.
The Human Cost: Birth Rates, Loneliness, and a Generation in Distress
There is a tendency in essays like this one to keep the conversation at the level of dollar figures and policy. The human cost is harder to fit into a chart and easier to overlook.
The U.S. fertility rate hit its lowest point since 2000 in the most recent National Center for Health Statistics report. Gen Z is delaying or forgoing children at unprecedented rates. The reasons given, repeatedly, in survey after survey: housing costs, student debt, childcare costs, healthcare costs, climate anxiety, and a generalized sense that the economic ladder has had its lower rungs sawed off. Thirty-six percent of Gen Z respondents in one recent survey said they had given up on major life decisions because of cost.
Gallup’s 2025 tracking found that only 39 percent of Gen Z adults consider themselves “thriving” — down five points from 2024. Among Gen Z women, the number is 37 percent. A National Bureau of Economic Research paper this year documented what economists are now calling “young worker despair”: a decade-long collapse in mental health among workers under 30, occurring despite rising wages, driven by housing, healthcare, student debt, social isolation, and a basic sense that the system does not work for them. The midlife crisis, the paper notes, has been replaced by a quarter-life one.
A UNICEF-led 2025 study of more than 5,600 Gen Z respondents across the globe found six in ten feeling overwhelmed by current events and four in ten still facing stigma around mental health in school and work. Loneliness rates among young adults are at modern highs. Birth rates are at modern lows. Suicide rates among young workers are rising. None of this is happening in isolation from the economy. All of it is downstream of a labor market in which the people doing the work are told, repeatedly and on the record, that they are a cost to be optimized away.
You cannot run an economy in which a generation watches its parents get laid off after 30 years of loyalty, watches its peers replaced by chatbots, watches its rent triple, watches its healthcare claims denied, watches its CEOs pay themselves 600 times the median, and then ask that same generation why it doesn’t want to bring children into the world. The answer is in the question.
The Hope: Gen Z, the Ballot, and the Long Road Back
Here is where I want to land. Because despite everything I’ve just written, I do not think the story ends in collapse, and I do not think the story ends in revolution. I think it ends in politics — slow, unglamorous, often disappointing politics — and I think Gen Z is going to be the generation that does it.
There are signs already, and the most interesting ones are on the right. A new bench of Gen Z conservatives is coming online inside the party that currently holds the federal government, and they are doing it with a populist edge that did not exist on the Republican side a decade ago. Wyatt Gable, a 22-year-old former Turning Point USA chapter president from Onslow County, North Carolina, beat a ten-term incumbent in a 2024 primary and became the youngest member ever elected to the North Carolina General Assembly and its first Gen Z legislator. Brandon Gill of Texas, sworn in to the 119th Congress at 31, is currently the youngest Republican in the U.S. House. Mason Foley, 28, is running to fill the Tennessee Seventh after Mark Green’s resignation. Joe Mitchell, a 28-year-old former Iowa state representative, is running for the Iowa Second. The assassination of Charlie Kirk on a Utah college campus in September 2025 — Kirk being the founder of Turning Point USA and the dominant Gen Z conservative organizer of his era — has, by every account from the operatives running campaigns, accelerated the pipeline rather than dampened it.
What matters for the argument of this essay is not party affiliation but policy direction. The populist-conservative wing of the Republican Party — the wing that voters under thirty actually moved toward in 2024 — has spent several years developing a real antitrust posture, particularly against Big Tech, and a real skepticism of the corporate-board class that has presided over the offshoring, the layoffs, and the executive-compensation explosion. Senators like Josh Hawley have introduced legislation targeting stock buybacks and executive pay. JD Vance, before becoming Vice President, was openly hostile to the financial-engineering-as-corporate-strategy model that produced the current CEO class. There is a coalition there, on the right, large enough to do real work — if the next wave of young Republicans picks up that thread instead of letting the donor class wave them off it.
The state-level momentum is already bipartisan and accelerating. Pay-ratio taxes have spread from Portland and San Francisco to at least nine more states with bills introduced. The federal Tax Excessive CEO Pay Act would impose graduated tax increases on companies with pay ratios above 50 to 1. Eighty percent of voters across the political spectrum support penalties on companies that pay CEOs more than 50 times their median worker — that is not a partisan number, that is a country talking. Antitrust enforcement, dormant for forty years, has begun to wake up. The FTC and DOJ have filed cases against Google, Meta, Amazon, and Live Nation that would have been unthinkable a decade ago, initiated by appointees of both parties, and the cases are still moving.
What needs to happen next is not mysterious. Break up the dominant firms. Restore real competition in healthcare, telecom, airlines, agriculture, pharmacy benefits, and search. Cap pay ratios through tax policy and federal contracting preferences. End the stock-buyback regime that has converted American corporations from productive enterprises into financial engines for executive enrichment. Reform the H-1B and offshoring incentives so the cost of replacing American workers reflects the cost to the American economy. Treat health insurance denial rates as the regulated outputs they should be — published, audited, and tied to coverage mandates. Bring criminal liability back to corporate fraud and antitrust violations. Make CEOs personally accountable for the harm their companies do, the way the founders of those companies were.
None of this requires socialism. All of it requires politics. And politics requires that Gen Z stop expressing its rage in look-alike contests and start expressing it at the ballot box, on school boards, in state legislatures, in Congress, on the boards of public pension funds, and — eventually — in the boardrooms of the companies whose behavior they want to change. The folk-hero glow around a 26-year-old in a courtroom is not a political program. A political program looks like the unflattering, multi-decade grind of building a coalition large enough to make Congress, the courts, and the corporate boards do what 80 percent of the country already wants done.
Final Word
People hate CEOs because the modern American CEO, as a class, has done everything possible to deserve it. They have paid themselves like aristocrats while telling their workers to be grateful for crumbs. They have laid off workers while announcing record profits in the same earnings call. They have replaced human beings with AI that does not work, or with workers in countries chosen for being too far away to push back. They have raised prices in markets they have stripped of competition and told consumers it was inflation. They have denied healthcare claims at the highest rates in the industrialized world and then claimed not to understand why the public reacted the way it did when one of them was killed.
Simon Sinek wrote that leaders eat last. The current generation of chief executives eats first, eats most, and salts the field on the way out. The result is a country in which 41 percent of voters under 30 found the assassination of a healthcare CEO acceptable, 62 percent of them think socialism sounds good, and the birth rate is in free fall. That is not a culture problem. That is a leadership failure on a scale this country has not seen since the Gilded Age.
The Gilded Age, for what it’s worth, did not end with revolution either. It ended with a generation of younger voters who got organized, got loud, and elected the people who broke up the trusts. That is what is supposed to happen next. The CEOs who think the worst is behind them have not been paying attention. The worst, for them, is just getting started — and democratically, lawfully, through the ballot box, that is exactly as it should be.
Gal Ratner writes on technology, leadership, and the economy.