Exxon chief earns four times as much as bosses at Shell and BP

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ExxonMobil’s chief executive collected a pay packet last year worth almost four times that of bosses at rivals BP and Shell, underlining the vast disparity between European and US remuneration in the booming oil sector.

Darren Woods received salary, stock options and a bonus amounting to $36.9mn in 2023, the US’s biggest oil company reported in a securities filing on Thursday. That was $1mn more than the previous year. 

His remuneration compares with the $26.5mn paid to Mike Wirth, boss of rival US supermajor Chevron, which was a $3mn increase on the previous year.

The pay was significantly lower for the heads of transatlantic peers. Shell chief executive Wael Sawan made £7.9mn ($9.9mn), while Murray Auchincloss, who took the helm at BP in September, collected £8mn ($10mn).

The pay revelations come amid growing focus on a so-called transatlantic valuation gap, with US oil and gas groups enjoying a far higher market capitalisation as they benefit from a deeper pools of capital and a more favourable investor environment for fossil fuels.

Exxon boasts a market value of about $480bn versus $300bn for Chevron, $230bn for Shell and $110bn for BP.

Shell’s former chief executive, Ben van Beurden, told a Financial Times conference this week that the company — the biggest publicly listed group in the UK — was “massively undervalued” in London and may benefit from switching its listing to the US.

The FT revealed last year that Shell had considered quitting Europe and moving its listing to the US.

Oil and gas companies in the US and Canada tend to attribute a far greater portion of executive pay packets to incentives than their European counterparts.

“North American companies place a greater emphasis on pay-at-risk,” said Stephen Diotte, compensation practice leader at the Bedford Group, a Calgary-based consultancy.

“If an executive has a good year the impact of the incentive payments on total compensation can be quite significant. And that upside for pay won’t be anywhere near as high typically for a European based executive.”

The near $40mn haul for Woods falls short of the pay handed out to top tech executives last year, when Microsoft chief Satya Nadella made $48.5mn and Apple’s Tim Cook received $63.2mn.

Oil companies across the world have reported bumper profits over the past two years as Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine drove a surge in the price of crude.

Last year was Exxon’s second-most profitable on record, with profits of $36bn, only behind 2022. Woods’s base salary was worth about $1.9mn, with the vast majority of his pay packet based on variable factors such as bonus and stock-based awards.

His total pay was 199 times that of the median Exxon employee and the largest since he took the helm of the oil major in 2017.