Long Island's highest-paid executives: Top CEO made $17.2 million

Propelled by a stock price that hit an all-time high last year, Broadridge Financial Solutions Inc. CEO Timothy Gokey ranked as the highest-paid executive of a Long Island public company, with his compensation valued at $17.2 million, up 21% from 2024. And with a pay package of $4.4 million, Global Industrial Co.'s Anesa Chaibi became the first woman in seven years — and the first female CEO — to crack the top 10.

The median compensation for Long Island’s 10 highest-paid executives last year was $6.9 million, 115 times the median salary of a Long Island worker, according to a Newsday analysis of Securities and Exchange Commission filings.

The typical Long Islander’s paycheck paled in comparison to the pay packages for top executives. The median Long Island worker was paid $60,204 last year, up 1.3% from 2024, according to the state Labor Department. Even starker, the typical entry-level worker — often young people getting their first jobs — was paid $39,735. With inflation in the metropolitan area averaging 3.4% last year, the increase in median pay failed to keep pace with higher prices.

The pay gap between the highest earners and the vast majority of workers is not unique to Long Island.

“We know that the top 10% have about 50% of overall income,” said Josh Bivens, chief economist for the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based research organization.

In addition to Gokey, pay packages for three other executives exceeded $10 million: Stanley Bergman, who last year was chairman and CEO of Henry Schein Inc., a healthcare products distributor based in Melville, received a package of $12 million; Ivan Kaufman, chairman, president and CEO of Arbor Realty Trust Inc., a multifamily housing lender in Uniondale, ranked third at $11.8 million; and Conor Flynn, CEO of Jericho-based Kimco Realty Corp., ranked fourth at $11.6 million.

The bulk of compensation for executives in the top 10 includes stock options, restricted stock awards and bonuses linked to operational goals and performance of the company’s stock. In Gokey’s case, about $13.4 million of his $17.2 million compensation came from restricted stock awards and stock options.

The full list of the 182 highest-paid executives at 48 Long Island public companies is dominated by C-suite jobs such as chief executive, chief operating officer, chief financial officer and other senior management positions. The median compensation was $851,682, down 0.7% from 2024. Median means half earned more and half less.

The year-over-year drop in median compensation was skewed because four high-paid executives on the 2024 list with pay ranging from $3.8 million to $10.8 million were not on the 2025 list. The 2024 list also included a one-year, unusually large options package for Flagstar CEO Joseph Otting, whose $34.8 million compensation lapped the field in 2024 with Gokey in second place at $14.3 million. Otting’s compensation last year was $7.7 million.

The Center on Executive Compensation, a corporate governance organization, notes that one-time stock awards and the variability of executives sometimes make year-over-year comparisons “difficult, if not impossible.”

Broadridge stock hit all-time high in 2025

Broadridge, a provider of financial technology and investor communications platforms to banks, brokerages and public companies, is one of Long Island’s biggest employers, with about 2,200 employees in New York, most working at its Lake Success headquarters or its three Edgewood offices. As a result of its soaring stock price, Broadridge ended last year with a stock market value of $26 billion, the highest of any Long Island company. Its annual revenue of $7.5 billion trails only Henry Schein’s $13.6 billion among Long Island public companies.

Chaibi’s breakthrough into the top 10 is significant because CEOs of Long Island’s billion-dollar companies have typically been white men.

While it might be premature to call it a sea change in the C-suite, Long Island’s 10 biggest companies have become more diverse at the CEO level. Chaibi was named CEO of Global Industrial last year. In January, Martina McIsaac, who in 2025 was president and chief operating officer of MSC Industrial Direct Co. Inc., was promoted to CEO, replacing Erik Gershwind.

Frederick Lowery became the first Black executive to lead Henry Schein when he succeeded CEO Bergman in March. Henry Schein is Long Island’s biggest public company by revenue, MSC is No. 3 and Global Industrial No. 7. MSC and Global are both distributors of industrial supplies and equipment to businesses.

Maximum compensation for Lowery and McIsaac this year depends on various metrics, including how well their company’s stock performs. If they meet their performance goals, Lowery could potentially receive around $17 million and McIsaac about $5 million, according to their employment agreements filed with the SEC. As MSC’s president and chief operating officer in 2025, McIsaac was paid $2.2 million, putting her 36th on the list of highest earners.

Despite Chaibi’s milestone, last year was a mixed year for Long Island’s women executives. The gender pay gap shrank: Median compensation for women was $676,059, up from $547,036 in 2024. For male executives, the median pay package was $883,876, down from $911,820 in 2024. But only 15% of the executives were women, down from 16% in 2024. Nationally, women hold about 29% of C-suite positions, according to Manhattan-based management consulting firm McKinsey & Co.

Backlash against Arbor CEO pay package

But even as the vast majority of executive compensation packages received overwhelming support from shareholders, the $11.8 million pay package for Arbor Realty CEO Kaufman faced significant opposition at the company’s annual SEC-mandated “say-on-pay” vote.

The vote came after Arbor’s stock fell 34% in 2025 and another 30% in the first half of this year, hitting a six-year low. The company also reduced its dividend in May 2025 as Kaufman said loan delinquencies caused a “significant drag on earnings.” Arbor reduced the dividend again in May.

“Most public companies typically have strong say-on-pay support at their annual shareholder meeting,” said Kelly Malafis, a founding partner of Manhattan-based Compensation Advisory Partners, which advises companies on executive compensation. Through the first half of this year, about 2,000 companies held say-on-pay votes. The median level of support was 95%, Malafis said. For the 16 Long Island companies that held say-on-pay votes, the median support level was 97%.

But only 56% of Arbor shareholders voted to support Kaufman’s compensation package.

“When support starts to fall below 90%, or significantly below 90%, it signals significant shareholder dissatisfaction,” said Charles Elson, founding director of the Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware.

Powerful shareholder advisory firm ISS considers say-on-pay proposals that get less than 70% shareholder support a red flag that could result in it recommending a vote against compensation committee members. And corporate governance monitor Boardroom Alpha labels less than 70% shareholder support a “say-on-pay revolt.”

Arbor did not respond to requests for comment, but in an SEC filing the company said it takes say-on-pay results “into consideration when making future decisions regarding the compensation” of its executives.

The SEC also requires that larger public companies calculate the ratio between their CEO’s pay and the pay of the company’s median employee.

At Broadridge, for example, CEO Gokey’s pay was 216 times the $79,503 compensation of the median worker in the company’s 15,100 global workforce. Put another way, this means the median Broadridge employee would have to work 216 years to equal Gokey’s compensation. Last year, the typical CEO earned 89 times the pay of their median employee, according to a database of 2,470 companies compiled by the University of Alabama.

Broadridge declined to comment for this story.

‘Moonshot’ packages top $200M

Nationally, 15 CEOs received so-called “moonshot” compensation of at least $100 million last year, up from only two in 2024, with 10 of the 15 topping $200 million.

“The moonshot is no longer considered way out there,” Elson said. “It is becoming a standard practice, which is a real problem.” But even $200 million is eclipsed by 2025’s most out-of-this-world moonshot: Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s reported $158 billion compensation. The median Tesla employee earned $62,786 in 2025 — about the same as the median pay of a Long Island worker. That median Tesla employee can equal Musk's $158 billion compensation — if they work for 2.5 million years.

While top executives have always been paid more than most of their employees, what’s changed is how much more some are paid now. In the 1970s, CEOs typically earned about 25 times more than the median worker, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

“It creates within the organization two classes of people, and that’s not a healthy way,” Elson said. “Those on the top who take most of the gains and those who work there, who produce those gains and who don’t share in it.”