The millionaires who run Charlotte's largest companies

Plus: Readers slam Ledger on UNC, Gaston County and health projections; Grocery-store bars reopen; May rezonings; Governor extends eviction moratorium; Braxton Winston arrest video

Jun 01, 2020

This post appeared in the June 1, 2020, edition of The Charlotte Ledger, an e-newsletter focusing on business-y news and insights in Charlotte, N.C. Sign up for free, or become a paying subscriber for access to all content:

BofA’s Moynihan ousts LendingTree’s Lebda for title of best-paid local CEO; $26M in total pay for 2019

(Photo by Pepi Stojanovski/Unsplash)

by Tony Mecia

Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan was the top-paid CEO among locally based companies last year, bringing in a total of $26M in compensation, according to The Ledger’s annual review of executive pay.

Moynihan replaced LendingTree’s Doug Lebda atop the pay list. Lebda was the reigning champion for two years running, with eye-popping total compensation of $60M in 2017 and $42M in 2018 as his board extended his contract. Last year, Lebda made do with just $9M, securities filings show.

Most publicly traded companies release detailed information on executive pay in securities filings in March and April. The Ledger reviewed the information for the area’s largest companies, as ranked by Fortune magazine in a list that came out this month.

Last year was a solid financial year for most locally based companies. Nearly every one experienced increases in stock price. Bank of America was up more than 40%, and LendingTree surged more than 30%.

This year’s pay list includes nine CEOs who made $10M+ in total compensation. That includes the heads of Charlotte newcomers Honeywell (Darius Adamczyk, $20.5M), Truist Financial (Kelly King, $11.5M) and Dentsply Sirona (Donald Casey, $11.4M).

While that sounds like a lot of money, the figures for total compensation are not all money that goes into the CEOs’ bank accounts. Some is in stock that they can’t yet sell, which is valued at the time it is issued and could be worth less money today.

All this information is publicly available, and lots of people are curious about the income of our corporate chieftains — so we’re compiling it and passing it along. In our experience, corporate PR people don’t like to discuss the big boss’ pay, but they tend to point out that it is set by an independent board of directors and aligns with shareholders’ interests. They also tend to emphasize that their CEOs give generously to charitable causes.

Here’s the full list.

Fortune 1000 rank, description, 2019 revenue, CEO and median worker pay in 2019:

#25. Bank of America. Charlotte bank. Revenue: $113.6B. Compensation: CEO Brian Moynihan, $26M. Median employee: $94,256.
#44. Lowe’s. Mooresville home-improvement retailer. Revenue: $72.1B. Compensation: CEO Marvin Ellison, $11.6M. Median employee: $22,748.
#92. Honeywell. Charlotte electronics maker. Revenue: $36.7B. Compensation: CEO Darius Adamczyk, $20.5M. Median employee: $69,513.
#123. Duke Energy. Charlotte power utility. Revenue: $24.7B. Compensation: CEO Lynn Good, $15M. Median employee: $123,608.
#139. Nucor. Charlotte steelmaker. Revenue: $22.6B. Compensation: CEO John Ferriola (retired Dec. 31), $19.1M. Median employee: $87,573.
#217. Truist Financial. Charlotte bank. Revenue: $14.7B. Compensation: CEO Kelly King, $11.5M. Median employee: $101,421.
#301. Sonic Automotive. Charlotte car retailer. Revenue: $10.5B. Compensation: Executive chairman Bruton Smith, $2.4M. Median employee: $57,100.
#381. CommScope. Hickory communications-equipment maker. $8.3B. Compensation: CEO Marvin Edwards, $14M. Median employee (includes part-time/seasonal): $12,769.
#457. Brighthouse Financial. Charlotte insurance company. Revenue: $6.6B. Compensation: CEO Eric Steigerwalt, $8.5M. Median employee: $150,678.
#532. Domtar. Fort Mill paper-products maker. Revenue: $5.2B. Compensation: CEO John Williams, $6.8M. Median employee: $81,678.
#562. Coca-Cola Consolidated. Charlotte drink distributor. Revenue: $4.8B. Compensation: CEO Frank Harrison, $11.7M. Median employee: $45,254.
#564. Sealed Air. Charlotte packaging maker. Revenue: $4.8B. Compensation: CEO Edward Doheny, $9M. Median employee: $55,804.
#618. Jeld-Wen. Charlotte building-materials maker. Revenue: $4.3B. Compensation: CEO Gary Michel, $5.5M. Median employee: $82,003 (approx.).
#642. Dentsply Sirona. Charlotte medical-products company. Revenue: $4B. Compensation: CEO Donald Casey, $11.4M. Median employee: $50,861.
#683. Albemarle Corp. Charlotte chemical maker. Revenue: $3.6B. Compensation: CEO Luther Kissam, $8.5M. Median employee: $77,782.
#875. Curtiss-Wright. Davidson aerospace company. Revenue: $2.5B. Compensation: CEO David Adams, $9.2M. Median employee: $57,569.
#881. Ingersoll Rand. Davidson industrial machinery maker. Revenue: $2.5B. Compensation: CEO Vicente Reynal, $5.5M. Median employee: $61,496.
#999. SPX Flow. Charlotte industrial-machinery maker. Revenue: $2B. Compensation: CEO Marcus Michael, $4.9M. Median employee: $51,651.

The top 1,000 companies in the U.S. each had 2018 revenues of about $2B+, which means that several notable Charlotte-area companies failed to make the cut. Among them:

SPX Corp., Charlotte industrial manufacturer. Revenue: $1.5B. Compensation: CEO Eugene Lowe, $7.6M. Median employee: $62,953.
Extended Stay America, Charlotte hotel operator. Revenue: $1.2B. Compensation: CEO Bruce Haase (started as CEO November 2019), $4M. Median employee: $24,483.
EnPro Industries, Charlotte industrial manufacturer. Revenue: $1.2B. Compensation: CEO Marvin Riley (started as CEO July 2019), $2.6M. Median employee: $50,645.
LendingTree, Charlotte financial-services marketer. Revenue: $1.1B. Compensation: CEO Doug Lebda, $9M. Median employee: $96,957.
Cato, Charlotte clothing retailer. Revenue: $825M. Compensation: CEO John Cato, $5.3M. Median employee: $29,611.

Charlotte protest news

Sunday night arrests: At least 15 people were arrested uptown on Sunday night after clashes with police in the third straight night of protests. Some businesses were damaged — including 5Church, Kings Kitchen, McCormick & Schmicks and Chipotle. Some of the vandals used scooters to smash windows. Earlier in the day, thousands gathered peacefully in First Ward Park. (WSOC)
SouthPark protest? City Council member Tariq Bokhari said that SouthPark residents should not be concerned about an apparent planned protest today at noon that’s starting in the Belk parking lot at the mall. In a Twitter post on Sunday night (later deleted), he said nearby residents were expressing “serious concerns” but that they should “rest easy” because “this is tracking towards being a peaceful protest. And if it isn’t, our men and women in blue are more than prepared to handle it.” An Instagram announcement of the protest that Bokhari included said demonstrators would “march through all the white communities nearby, until EVERY Karen is disturbed.”
Braxton Winston arrest video: City Council member Braxton Winston tweeted out video footage of his Friday night arrest by Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police, who charged him with failing to disperse during protests. The footage shows several officers grabbing him and taking him to the ground as he backpedaled a few feet away from an approaching police line. Winston wrote that he was there in his “official capacity as City Council Member At Large.” He added: “I am confident that the whole truth will be presented and I will be exonerated of any wrongdoing.”

Today’s supporting sponsor is T.R. Lawing Realty:

Reader response

Time to open the ol’ virtual mailbag to hear from Ledger readers. Have a comment? Email editor@cltledger.com.

In response to “Hospitals pull plug on field hospital”:

“Was glad to see Amazon restarted delivery of non-essential items. Any day now I should be getting my expensive, powerful binoculars that I will use to try to catch a glimpse of those goal posts that Gibbie and Dena keep moving off into the future. I see the ‘peak’ is now in June. How did they conjure up that date? Anything to keep the lockdown in place and hope people forget how inaccurate every prediction they have made has been.”
“Too bad The Ledger doesn’t have a columnist. I’d send him or her to a fortune teller to ask for coronavirus predictions. Then we could see whether county officials or the fortune teller was more accurate.”
“It’s ‘heads we win, tails the locked-down public loses.’ It's not that the brain trust was dead wrong on needing a field hospital, it’s that the lock-down they implemented was so far-seeing and amazingly effective thanks to their astonishing foresight. God help us.”

In response to “New preferred term: ‘physical distancing’”:

“You cite a CNN report on a preferred moniker, ‘physical distancing,’ instead of ‘social distancing,’ as advised by the World Health Organization, who received $400,000,000 of American taxpayers’ money last year. It advised as late as mid-February that Covid-19 would not become a pandemic. This is satire, right? For me to take your reporting seriously, you really need to cite more credible, unbiased sources.”

In response to “Not staying at home”:

“Just because people are moving around does not mean they are not social distancing. It’s more the difference between quarantining and not. For instance, we have found opportunities to hike within an easy drive from town and we do not interact with another human being during the entire process. It’s possible people are finding ways to creatively get out of the house and move around but without interacting with others outside their family and that’s what’s reflected in the cell phone data.”

In response to “Brad Panovich furloughed but still delivers the weather”:

“What a great catch about Panovich’s status on Saturday night. We were watching WCNC hoping to hear from him. I got the feeling they had to scramble Larry Sprinkle into the studio to share some of the burden because before he got there. Their coverage was … rough.”
“What a great scoop about WCNC furloughing Brad Panovich! What idiots at Tegna. Furlough your most popular/highest rated talent? This is like CNN furloughing Wolf Blitzer or Anderson Cooper.”

In response to “April? May? June? No, new peak is July 14, county says”:

“Your commentary about projections and preparations in Mecklenburg County is somewhat disrespectful and almost ridiculing in a sarcastic manner because it appears that your attitude is that there have been overreactions and overblown preparations. There is a saying in epidemiology that if afterwards people say you overreacted that probably means you did enough. You make the point today that gee, now the peak will be in July, and you quote from a month ago, as if to ridicule the efforts of this county’s leaders. In fact that is exactly what ‘flattening the curve’ is all about! It is critical to respect science and unbiased experts especially during a pandemic, and the media has a responsibility to foster public understanding of science. Fine, criticize public officials for public policy issues, but do not ridicule or imply that they are overreacting or not following appropriate guidance from respected scientists.”

In response to “Gaston County’s defiant ‘reopening’”:

“Even though most Gaston County residents think Chairman Philbeck was too aggressive with his statements about the stay-at-home order, they also see that we are being asked to suffer damage to our business community due to a lack of consideration in parts of the the Governor’s order for less-urbanized areas. … Making a comment that ‘This is Gaston County we are talking about’ is unnecessary and seems to imply that we are less intelligent or possibly less law-abiding citizens. That is simply not true. An apology may be in order.”

In response to “Silent on Sam, UNC chairman eyes a full term” and “Quick re-election for UNC chairman after questions on credentials”:

“Randy Ramsey is a good guy. I guess when folks don’t respond that that just leaves reporters with questions. Anytime someone quotes Policy Watch my trust of them just went down.”
“Chickensh— journalism. You have fallen for the ‘politics of the UNC System’ with your posting of the Randy Ramsey (UNC) material. I thought you might be real journalism, but I guess not. We don’t need another NC Policy Watch.”

May’s hot rezoning action

Developers filed nine rezoning petitions in Charlotte in the month of May, including:

two plans for big housing developments in University City
a medical office/townhouse mix in Elizabeth
a mixed-use development near Highland Creek
a retail/storage facility with an open-air farmers market in west Charlotte

The full list of rezoning petitions filed each month is available to paying Ledger subscribers.

If that describes you, you can access the complete list for May here:

May rezonings

Grocery store bars spring back to life

Thirsty patrons packed the Harris Teeter craft beer and wine bar at Ballantyne Commons Parkway on Friday, the first day the bar was back open since dining establishments were ordered closed due to the coronavirus pandemic. The bar has its own Facebook group with a very Charlotte-appropriate number of followers: 704. Gov. Roy Cooper’s latest order keeping bars closed applies only to establishments that primarily sell alcohol for on-site consumption, which does not include restaurants and grocery stores.

In brief:

Eviction moratorium extended: Gov. Roy Cooper on Saturday extended a moratorium on evictions in North Carolina for an additional three weeks. The new executive order bars landlords from seeking legal action to evict tenants for nonpayment or late payment of rent and from charging interest or late fees. The order applies to residential and commercial properties. It also bans utility shut-offs. (Order here, FAQ here)
Convention deadline: Organizers of the Republican National Convention say they are giving state officials until Wednesday to guarantee that a “full convention” can take place in Charlotte at the end of August. Otherwise, they said they will “immediately need to begin making modifications as to how the convention will proceed.” In a letter Saturday, they said the RNC will need hotels, restaurants and bars operating at full capacity to accommodate convention-goers. It’s the latest back-and-forth between state officials and RNC organizers. (WFAE)
Women suffering brunt of shutdowns: “Women between the ages of 20 and 64 make up about 37% of the state’s labor force, according to census data. Yet 58% of the nearly 835,000 workers who filed N.C. unemployment claims in March and April were women.” (Observer)
Small-business grant program: Applications open today for a new program from the city of Charlotte that offers grants of up to $250,000 for projects that help small businesses. Details here.

Taking stock

Unless you are a day trader, checking your stocks daily is unhealthy. So how about weekly? How local stocks of note fared last week (through Friday’s close), and year to date:

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Executive editor: Tony Mecia; Managing editor: Cristina Bolling; Contributing editor: Tim Whitmire; Reporting intern: David Griffith

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