Afterpay co-founders take home record $264m as Australian executive pay bounces back

Chief executive bonuses, which had been kept down amid market turmoil during lockdowns, rebounded from a record low of 31% of base pay in 2020 to a record high of 76.7% in 2021.

The average chief executive bonus reached a record of $2.31m last year, narrowly beating the previous highest average, $2.3m, recorded in 2017.

Amid sluggish wage growth for ordinary people, chief executive pay among the top 100 listed companies climbed to a record multiple of about 100 times average adult earnings.

Eisen and Molnar reaped most of their record earnings not through bonuses but through options to buy shares in their company for $1 each at a time when they were trading on the stock exchange for $90 or more.

The share prices of most BNPL companies subsequently collapsed by as much as 90%, but Afterpay was shielded from the worst of the market carnage because it had agreed to sell itself to US fintech Square, run by the Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey.

Greg Goodman, of property company Goodman Group, was third on $37.1m, Shemara Wikramanayake of Macquarie Group came fourth on $14.7m and the Woolworths boss, Brad Banducci, took fifth at $11.8m.

The Qantas boss, Alan Joyce, was the only CEO in the ASX100 not to receive a bonus in 2020 or 2021, as the airline struggled with grounded planes due to the pandemic.

He said investors would be paying close attention to the pay results announced by companies after the end of the financial year on 30 June.

He said Acsi was also closely monitoring exit payments.

The research was conducted for Acsi by proxy firm Ownership Matters.