Chief executives
Also called CEO, Chief executive officer, President, President and CEO, Executive director
In brief
In May 2025, BLS counted 204,350 US chief executives, with median pay of $213,990 a year. Of the BLS counts since 2003, the highest was 389,880, in May 2003. The earliest figure here is an estimate of 40,000 from 1900, not measured the same way as today's count. The last full technology era for chief executives: Real-time analytics, 2005 to 2022.
What the sources say
Official outlook
BLS projects employment to grow 3.2% from 2025 to 2035.
AI exposure studies
- 35% of this job's tasks are exposed to large language models. Not a forecast of job losses. Eloundou and others, 2023
- 0.015 estimated probability that the whole occupation could be computerised, over an unspecified number of years. Not a forecast of job losses. Frey and Osborne, 2013
Since the 2013 prediction
In 2013, Frey and Osborne put this job's probability of computerisation at 0.015. BLS counted 248,760 of these jobs in May 2013 and 204,350 in May 2025 (-18%, a change derived by Future History).
Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. BLS publishes these counts as yearly survey snapshots and cautions against reading them as a precise trend. In May 2021 BLS changed how it estimates these counts (a model-based method using three years of survey data) and moved fully to the 2018 occupation codes, so part of a change across 2021 can come from the method rather than the work.
Last updated .
Cite this page
Future History. (2026, October 11). Chief executives: jobs and pay since 1900 [Data set; data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35]. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/11-1011
Future History. "Chief executives: jobs and pay since 1900." Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. Last modified October 11, 2026. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/11-1011.
@misc{futurehistory_11_1011, author = {{Future History}}, title = {Chief executives: jobs and pay since 1900}, year = {2026}, month = oct, howpublished = {\url{https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/11-1011}}, note = {Last updated 2026-10-11. Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35}, }
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≈ $208,504 in 2024 prices (derived by us, CPI-adjusted)
March 22, 1811: New York State passes the Act Relative to Incorporations for Manufacturing Purposes, the first general incorporation law in the United States. Before this act, forming a corporation required a special act of the state legislature; the 1811 law allowed any five or more persons to incorporate by filing standard articles. Connecticut followed in 1837. General incorporation laws transformed the corporate form from a political privilege into a routine legal instrument, setting the stage for the proliferation of enterprises each requiring a professional chief executive to lead them on behalf of dispersed shareholders.
The railroad era produces the first generation of professional chief executives in America: Cornelius Vanderbilt at the New York Central, Stanford and Huntington at the Central Pacific, Jay Gould across multiple railroads. These men were simultaneously the dominant shareholders and the operating executives of their enterprises: the owner-manager model that Berle and Means would later identify as the starting point before the separation of ownership and control. What they established was the expectation that one person holds organizational accountability: the board may govern, but one individual speaks for the enterprise and decides its direction.
Alfred P. Sloan implements the multidivisional structure at General Motors, separating the CEO role from the divisional management roles in a way that would define the modern corporation. Under Sloan's model, the corporate president oversees strategy and capital allocation; divisional general managers handle operations. The CEO becomes a capital allocator and strategic overseer rather than an operational supervisor: a distinction that remains the defining feature of the role at large organizations today.
Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means publish "The Modern Corporation and Private Property," the most influential analysis of corporate governance in the 20th century. Their central finding: the separation of corporate ownership (shareholders) from corporate control (managers) had created a new power structure in American capitalism. The 200 largest US corporations controlled the majority of industrial production; their executives operated with minimal accountability to dispersed shareholders who suffered from rational apathy. Berle and Means defined the agency problem, the divergence of interests between owners and the managers who act on their behalf, that would drive corporate governance debate for the next nine decades.
Milton Friedman publishes "The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Its Profits" in the New York Times Magazine (September 13, 1970), articulating the shareholder-primacy doctrine that would reshape the chief executive's job description over the next two decades. The Business Roundtable formally adopts the shareholder-primacy principle in 1970. Within fifteen years, the hostile takeover wave, financed by Milken's junk bonds, and the spread of stock option compensation have realigned corporate incentives around the principle Friedman articulated. The CEO's success metric, which had been multi-stakeholder through the postwar era, narrows to a single number: share price.
July 30, 2002: President Bush signs the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, enacted in direct response to the Enron, WorldCom, and Tyco accounting scandals that had wiped out billions in investor value. Section 302 requires CEOs and CFOs to personally certify the accuracy of quarterly financial reports. Section 906 makes false certification a criminal offense: fines up to $5 million and imprisonment up to 20 years. For the first time in the history of American corporate law, the chief executive bears personal criminal liability, not just civil liability, for the accuracy of the organization's financial disclosures. SOX certification became the most consequential individual accountability mechanism in the chief executive's job.
Maryland becomes the first US state to pass benefit corporation legislation on April 13, 2010, followed by 35 more states and Washington D.C. within eight years. The benefit corporation form gives CEOs explicit legal permission, and legal cover, to consider employee, community, and environmental interests alongside shareholder returns, resolving a tension that had existed since Berle and Means identified the agency problem. By 2018, the B Corp certification (a separate voluntary standard from B Lab) had been adopted by over 2,500 companies globally. The benefit corporation movement began repositioning what "good CEO performance" meant for a significant and growing segment of American business.
August 19, 2019: 181 CEOs of major US corporations, convened by the Business Roundtable, sign a "Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation" committing to serve customers, employees, suppliers, communities, and shareholders. The statement explicitly replaces the Business Roundtable's 1970 shareholder-primacy principle: "shareholder interests on the same level as those of customers, employees, suppliers and communities." Whether the signatories' companies subsequently behaved differently is contested; Harvard Law School researchers concluded the pledge was "mostly for show." But the statement marked the formal institutional repudiation of the shareholder-primacy doctrine at the highest level of US corporate leadership, exactly 49 years after the Business Roundtable had adopted it.
Microsoft 365 Copilot becomes generally available to enterprise customers on November 1, 2023; OpenAI ChatGPT Enterprise had launched August 28, 2023. Chief executives are among the earliest enterprise adopters: the documentation artifacts of the role (board memos, earnings scripts, all-hands talking points, strategy presentations) are precisely the tasks where LLM drafting assistance delivers the most immediate value. A CEO who previously spent 3 hours drafting a board presentation can now review and refine a draft in 45 minutes. Forrester's Total Economic Impact study found up to 116% ROI on Copilot deployment across enterprise knowledge workers. The chief executive's decision-making is unchanged; the production of the documents that frame those decisions is transformed.
Will AI replace chief executives? What the research says
Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, we show the disagreement rather than an average.
Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, the spread is the honest signal.
What's changing day to day for chief executives
Three parts of your work where AI is already doing real lifting, and what stays yours.
AI is sitting alongside you hereStay current on competitive landscape, industry trends, and macroeconomic signals using AlphaSense AI market intelligence, querying its business content for earnings call sentiment shifts, analyst target price revisions, and expert-call signals on competitor strategy
Stay current on competitive landscape, industry trends, and macroeconomic signals using AlphaSense AI market intelligence, querying its business content for earnings call sentiment shifts, analyst target price revisions, and expert-call signals on competitor strategy; using Hebbia for deep synthesis of complex regulatory or deal documents; filtering AI-generated intelligence through personal judgment about which signals are strategically actionable.[10],[11],[7]
AI converts the intelligence-gathering bottleneck from "how do I find enough information" to "how do I determine which information is strategically material." Build your signal-filtering judgment: which competitive moves merit a strategic response versus tactical noise, which macroeconomic signals your business is genuinely exposed to versus correlation without causation. The CEO who uses AlphaSense to surface more signals but applies sharper judgment to which signals to act on compounds the AI leverage advantage.
AI is sitting alongside you hereMonitor organizational performance using AI-proactive intelligence: review Tableau Pulse KPI anomaly alerts for revenue, margin, headcount, and customer-satisfaction deviations before the weekly leadership meeting
Monitor organizational performance using AI-proactive intelligence: review Tableau Pulse KPI anomaly alerts for revenue, margin, headcount, and customer-satisfaction deviations before the weekly leadership meeting; use Glean to surface institutional knowledge on prior decisions and precedents when evaluating performance exceptions; and reserve direct intervention for the deviations that represent genuine strategic signal versus operational noise the management team should resolve.[13],[14],[2]
Tableau Pulse surfaces what changed; your job is determining why it matters strategically. Build a mental model of the leading indicators that precede business-model deterioration in your industry: the early warnings that are easier to see with AI-generated pattern detection. The CEO who catches a strategic inflection point three months earlier than peers, because Pulse surfaced a pattern that would have taken weeks to notice in manual reporting, has a durable first-mover advantage.
AI is sitting alongside you hereLead M&A origination, evaluation, and integration: use AlphaSense to identify strategic acquisition targets and synthesize competitive intelligence on potential deals
Lead M&A origination, evaluation, and integration: use AlphaSense to identify strategic acquisition targets and synthesize competitive intelligence on potential deals; use Hebbia to accelerate virtual-data-room diligence synthesis across hundreds of documents; and apply CEO-level conviction to the acquisition decision, evaluating organizational culture fit, integration executability, and strategic alignment that AI-generated diligence outputs identify but cannot judge.[11],[2]
AI has dramatically compressed the time from M&A screening to diligence-ready conviction: Hebbia can synthesize a data room in days that previously required weeks of analyst effort. Your leverage is the judgment layer AI cannot reach: the integration-conviction question ("can our organization actually absorb and operate this acquisition well?") and the cultural-compatibility read that determines whether the deal is value-creating or value-destroying. The most common M&A failures are not analytical errors: they are judgment errors about integration readiness that no AI can diagnose in advance.
Where chief executives go next
Natural next steps for someone with your foundation: not exits, evolutions.
- General and Operations Managers
- US median pay
- $105,770 (May 2025)
- BLS outlook 2025-35
- +5%
- Management Analysts
- US median pay
- $101,860 (May 2025)
- BLS outlook 2025-35
- +10.1%
What each move takes
General and Operations Managers
CEOs who step back from the top role (whether by choice, succession transition, or PE-backed reorganization) most naturally land in General and Operations Manager roles for a division, subsidiary, or portfolio company. The competencies are largely co-extensive: P&L ownership, cross-functional leadership, strategy setting, and stakeholder management. The transition typically reduces scope (no board accountability, narrower stakeholder set) while preserving the leadership career. In private equity contexts, CEOs frequently become operating partners or portfolio company GMs after an exit. The AI-fluency advantage a CEO has built is directly transferable, and often more valued at the GM level where organizational AI transformation is in earlier stages and strong leadership on adoption is scarce.
How has the work of chief executives changed since 1811?
The tools that defined the work, one line per era. Select an era to see how it reshaped the work.
Corporate charter + telegraph + annual reports (joint-stock company era)
The corporate charter was the first tool of the chief executive: a legal document that defined the scope of the enterprise, the rights of shareholders, and the authority of the officers. Before general incorporation laws (New York 1811, Connecticut 1837), the charter was individually negotiated with the state legislature; after, it was a standardized form. The telegraph arrived in 1844 and immediately transformed what an executive could know about a geographically distributed business: Vanderbilt could receive daily traffic and revenue reports from stations across the New York Central's hundreds of miles of track without leaving his office. The annual report, first required of public corporations in this era, created the chief executive's most enduring artifact: a written account, signed by the president, of what the enterprise had accomplished and what it planned to do next. The accountability was personal and public in a way that purely private enterprises never required.
Telephone + management consulting (McKinsey 1926) + organizational hierarchy
The telephone (first commercial exchanges 1878-1880) gave the corporate president a real-time voice connection to every office and facility in the company for the first time, replacing the telegraph's coded written dispatches with direct conversation. The multidivisional corporation, pioneered at General Motors by Alfred Sloan (1921) and at DuPont by Pierre du Pont, created the organizational architecture that a modern CEO would recognize: semi-autonomous divisions reporting to a corporate center that controlled strategy and capital allocation. McKinsey & Company was founded in 1926 by James O. McKinsey, a University of Chicago accounting professor, to help corporate presidents apply systematic analytical frameworks to strategic decisions: the birth of management consulting as the external advisory layer for the chief executive. Marvin Bower joined McKinsey in 1933 and established the foundational norms: client interests first, only accept engagements where you can add value, maintain confidentiality absolutely. These norms defined what the CEO's external brain would look like for the next century.
BCG strategic frameworks (1960s) + MBA credentialing + mainframe financial reporting
The decades from 1930 to 1970 gave the chief executive three new instruments. First, the strategic consulting framework: McKinsey's rapid growth in the 1940s-1950s, followed by the founding of Boston Consulting Group in 1963 and Bain & Company in 1973, gave corporate presidents access to systematic competitive analysis, market segmentation, and portfolio planning. BCG's Bruce Henderson popularized the growth-share matrix in 1970: the first visual tool specifically designed to help a CEO allocate capital across a portfolio of businesses. Second, the MBA credential: Harvard Business School (founded 1908) and its peers produced the first generation of formally educated professional executives; by the 1960s the MBA was becoming a standard qualification for the executive suite. Third, the IBM mainframe: large corporations began installing management information systems in the 1960s that gave chief executives consolidated financial reporting across the enterprise, replacing the hand-tabulated reports that had been the only alternative since the founding of corporate accounting.
Shareholder value doctrine: Jensen & Meckling (1976), stock options, leveraged buyouts
The most consequential shift in the chief executive's job description in the 20th century came not from technology but from theory. Michael Jensen and William Meckling's 1976 paper 'Theory of the Firm: Managerial Behavior, Agency Costs and Ownership Structure' provided the analytical foundation for what Milton Friedman had argued in 1970: the CEO's primary obligation is to shareholders, and any deviation from profit maximization is a principal-agent failure. By the early 1980s, this framework had been operationalized through two mechanisms. First, the hostile takeover and leveraged buyout: Michael Milken's high-yield bond market made it possible for outsiders to acquire and restructure corporations whose executives were deemed insufficiently shareholder-focused; CEOs who could not justify their capital allocation faced takeover. Second, stock option grants linked executive pay to share price performance, aligning CEO compensation with the shareholder-value doctrine. By 1990, equity compensation had displaced salary as the primary component of large-company CEO pay. The chief executive was now evaluated, first and last, as a generator of shareholder returns.
Effect on the workThe shareholder-value era drove a wave of corporate restructuring, outsourcing, and workforce reduction. CEOs who presided over headcount reductions (Jack Welch at GE, Al Dunlap at Sunbeam) were celebrated by investors. The 1980s saw millions of workers displaced through restructuring and layoffs.
ERP systems + executive dashboards: SAP R/3 (1992), Cognos, Business Objects
SAP R/3 (1992) and Oracle Financials brought integrated enterprise data to the executive suite for the first time: a CEO could, in principle, see consolidated financials, inventory, and HR data from a single system rather than assembling them from departmental reports. Cognos and Business Objects built executive information systems: browser-based dashboards that delivered summarized KPIs to the chief executive without requiring IT department involvement. The balanced scorecard framework (Kaplan & Norton, Harvard Business Review, January 1992) gave CEOs a structured way to translate strategy into four linked measurement domains and communicate them to the organization. Together, these tools created the modern 'management operating system': a regular cadence of strategy review against a handful of tracked KPIs, driven by a single integrated data source. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (passed in response to the Enron, WorldCom, and Tyco accounting scandals) added a new dimension to the chief executive's accountability: personal criminal liability. Section 302 requires CEOs to personally certify the accuracy of quarterly financial reports.
Real-time analytics: Tableau (2003), Looker (2012), OKR operating cadence
Tableau Software (founded 2003) gave chief executives self-service access to visual analytics without relying on IT or finance to produce reports. Looker (2011) extended this to SQL-based analysis in the browser. Google Ventures-backed John Doerr's 'Measure What Matters' (2018) popularized OKRs, the goal-setting system originally developed at Intel and deployed at Google, across the broader executive class. Real-time operations visibility platforms (Palantir for defense-sector CEOs, Salesforce for sales-led companies, Workday for HR-intensive enterprises) brought the executive dashboard from a quarterly artifact to a daily instrument. The modern chief executive's information environment by 2020 was dramatically richer than anything available in 2000: real-time revenue, pipeline, headcount, and customer-health data were accessible from a mobile device. The cognitive load of synthesizing that data (and making decisions under uncertainty, faster) increased proportionally.
AI decision support: board-meeting assistants, strategy-memo drafting, LLM executive tools (2023+)
The chief executive is both the professional least likely to be displaced by AI and the professional most likely to benefit from it. The reasons have not changed: accountability cannot be delegated to software, boards cannot be held responsible by algorithms, and the judgment required to decide under genuine uncertainty, where the data is incomplete and the stakes are organizational, is exactly what current AI cannot supply. But the documentation layer of the chief executive's work is massively AI-amenable. Strategy memos, board presentations, investor letters, earnings scripts, all-hands talking points, and performance reviews are the writing artifacts of the executive role. ChatGPT-4 and Claude-level LLMs can draft these artifacts in minutes from structured input. The OpenAI ChatGPT Enterprise (August 2023) and Microsoft 365 Copilot (November 2023) were deployed first to knowledge-worker roles; chief executives who adopted them early reported reclaiming several hours per week previously spent on document drafting. Board-meeting AI assistants (Nasdaq Boardvantage, BoardEffect with AI, Diligent AI) deliver board-packet summaries, director Q&A preparation, and governance-risk flags before meetings. Anthropic's Claude for Enterprise and OpenAI's ChatGPT Team packages were explicitly marketed to the C-suite as strategy-memo and communications drafting tools by late 2024. The result is a chief executive who can produce higher-quality governance documentation faster, freeing the cognitive bandwidth for the judgment work that remains irreducibly human.
Effect on the workBLS projects net employment growth 2024-2034: modest but positive. The occupation is too small and too accountability-driven for AI to compress meaningfully. The structural driver of chief-executive demand is the number of independent organizations, which grows with economic activity. AI augments the role; it does not substitute for it.
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Browse all rolesChief Executives employment and pay by year
View all 28 years of cited US data, each linked to its source
| Year | US employment | Annual pay (median unless marked) | Source | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1900 | 40,000 | n/a | Est., Berle & Means (1932) Researched context | Report |
| 1932 | 65,000 | n/a | Est., Berle & Means (1932) Researched context | Report |
| 1970 | 110,000 | $50,000 | Est., Wikipedia (employment) Researched contextEst., Conference Board (pay) Researched context | Report |
| 1990 | n/a | $120,000 | Est., Wikipedia Researched context | Report |
| 2000 | 519,890 | $113,810 | BLS OEWS 2000 Official statistic | Report |
| 2003 | 389,880 | $134,740 | BLS OEWS May 2003 Official statistic | Report |
| 2004 | 346,590 | $140,350 | BLS OEWS May 2004 Official statistic | Report |
| 2005 | 321,300 | $142,440 | BLS OEWS May 2005 Official statistic | Report |
| 2006 | 299,520 | n/a | BLS OEWS May 2006 Official statistic | Report |
| 2007 | 299,160 | n/a | BLS OEWS May 2007 Official statistic | Report |
| 2008 | 301,930 | $158,560 | BLS OEWS May 2008 Official statistic | Report |
| 2009 | 297,640 | $160,720 | BLS OEWS May 2009 Official statistic | Report |
| 2010 | 273,500 | $165,080 | BLS OEWS May 2010 (employment) Official statisticBLS OEWS May 2010 (pay) Official statistic | Report |
| 2011 | 267,370 | $166,910 | BLS OEWS May 2011 Official statistic | Report |
| 2012 | 255,940 | $168,140 | BLS OEWS May 2012 Official statistic | Report |
| 2013 | 248,760 | $171,610 | BLS OEWS May 2013 Official statistic | Report |
| 2014 | 246,240 | $173,320 | BLS OEWS May 2014 Official statistic | Report |
| 2015 | 238,940 | $175,110 | BLS OEWS May 2015 Official statistic | Report |
| 2016 | 223,260 | $181,210 | BLS OEWS May 2016 Official statistic | Report |
| 2017 | 210,160 | $183,270 | BLS OEWS May 2017 Official statistic | Report |
| 2018 | 195,530 | $189,600 | BLS OEWS May 2018 Official statistic | Report |
| 2019 | 205,890 | $184,460 | BLS OEWS May 2019 Official statistic | Report |
| 2020 | 202,360 | $185,950 | BLS OEWS May 2020 Official statistic | Report |
| 2021 | 200,480 | $179,520 | BLS OEWS May 2021 Official statistic | Report |
| 2022 | 199,240 | $189,520 | BLS OEWS May 2022 Official statistic | Report |
| 2023 | 211,230 | $206,680 | BLS OEWS May 2023 Official statistic | Report |
| 2024 | 211,850 | $206,420 | BLS OEWS May 2024 Official statistic | Report |
| 2025 | 204,350 | $213,990 | BLS OEWS May 2025 Official statistic | Report |
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