Back out the base and the ratio does more work than the dollars. A median of $2.6mn after a 45.4% rise puts the 2021 technology median near $1.79mn [1][1], and a CEO median that gained $698,399 on a 17.2% move puts the 2021 CEO median near $4.06mn and the current one near $4.76mn [2][3][2], which reproduces the $2.27mn CEO-over-CTO gap Fortune reports for that year [13], so the file is at least internally consistent. The gap in dollars barely budged, from $2.27mn to about $2.16mn [13], while as a multiple of CTO pay it fell from roughly 2.3 times to roughly 1.8 times [3], and the multiple is the version a compensation committee negotiates against.
The 28.9% single-year jump that Fortune places in the cycle running from ChatGPT's launch to Microsoft selling Copilot to enterprise buyers [14][15] is most of the four years on its own: compound 1.289 up to 1.454 and the other three years supply about 13% between them [4]. One year of hiring did the work.
Proxy figures are grant-date values, not take-home pay [11], and grant-date values absorb signing awards at full face, which is how one hire moves a median. Hims & Hers reported $60.9mn for Mohamed Elshenawy in 2025 [10] against a $57.2mn new-hire award [6]; strip the award out and about $3.7mn is left for salary, bonus and everything else [5]. (The two May awards were priced on different days: his 1,036,339 units work out to about $55 each, Nader Kabbani's 216,333 to about $62, some 13% higher [7].)
By the last trading day of 2025 that unvested grant was worth $33.6mn, on the company's own figure [11], a markdown of $23.6mn or 41% on an award nobody had touched [6]. The $57.2mn was a price a board set in May, and the value is whatever the shares do before vesting, which is the distinction the median cannot carry.
Dan Laddin of Compensation Advisory Partners reads the trend as boards paying for output, telling Fortune that strategic CTOs are a real value-add [5], and the operating comparison supports him directionally, since the median CTO went from $176,000 behind the median COO in 2021 to $275,000 ahead [12] while CIO medians rose 9.2% [2], about a fifth of the technology move [9]. What the dataset does not contain is any measure of what the money bought. No revenue line, no margin line, only the cost of the people hired to run the programme, which makes this a measurement of price rather than of return.
The test arrives with the 2026 proxies. If technology medians hold near $2.6mn on annual grants rather than on signing awards, the role has been repriced; if they slide back toward that $1.79mn base once the hiring wave clears [1], then the $84,003 by which the CTO median gain exceeded the COO, CFO and CIO gains combined [3][4][8] was an auction premium for a few hundred people, and it will read that way in hindsight.
