Fiserv CEO Michael Lyons Gets $70 Million Salary

Fiserv Headquarters. Photo by Jeramey Jannene.

America is running out of superlatives to describe average CEO pay. Call the average pay level astonishing, incredible, call the ever-rising compensation meteoric or stratospheric, and the words seem barely adequate to the job.

The New York Times used to give this splashy annual coverage, with front-page headlines and long, detailed stories on the rise in executive pay. In the last couple of years it’s left the issue to its business columnist Jeff Sommer, and his column Sunday wasn’t even the lead headline in the business section. Is the newspaper suffering from corporate greed exhaustion?

Back in the late 1970s it was front-page news in America when Chrysler executive Lee Iacocca earned $1 million. In 2025 the highest-paid CEO, Elon Musk, received $132.3 billion. Yes, that’s for one year. The average worker at the top 100 companies, who is paid $101,322, would fall short of that pay if the employee had begun working at the dawn of human history.

Ah, but that’s just Musk, you say. Yes, his pay is way ahead of most others on the list of top CEOs. But it is a precedent that other CEOs can point to, and clearly having an impact. Dylan Field, CEO of Figma Inc., was second on the list with $864 million in pay, and Shankh S. Mitra, CEO of Welltower Inc., was third with $821 million. These are jaw-dropping numbers, or would be if your jaw hadn’t already hit the floor at the pay for Musk.

The annual roundup of pay was done by Equilar, which reported that median compensation for the top 100 chief executives “surged 35.8% to $39.4 million in 2025, representing a record high in this study’s history.” But nearly every year since 1980 has seen a new record for executive pay.

And as it did in most of the years since 1980, the gap between CEO and average worker pay grew ever wider. The median pay ratio expanded by 36.5% in 2025, with CEOs now earning 475 times more than the average worker, up from 348 the prior year. Meaning the average worker would have needed to start working in 1550, back during the Hapsburg-Ottoman War, to equal the annual pay of the boss.

Ah, but these are just national figures; surely things are not nearly as bad in the unassuming, flyover land of Wisconsin. Alas, no state is an island anymore, as proven by the pay for Michael P. Lyons, CEO of the Milwaukee-based company Fiserv Inc., who received $70.3 million in 2025. This was 798 times the average employee’s pay at the company.

It is also more than three times higher than the $23.8 million paid to Fiserv’s previous CEO, Frank Bisignano, in 2024, which was then the top pay in Wisconsin, as Urban Milwaukee reported. And these astounding payouts to the two CEOs were awarded despite dreadful five-year (-57%) and one-year (-68%) stock earnings for the company.

Sommer’s NYT column notes that Peter Drucker, the influential economist, management guru and Wall Street Journal columnist, used to suggest it felt “about right” when chief executives received up to 10 or 12 times what workers earned. And he said chief executives should voluntarily limit their pay, keeping it no higher than 20 times what the rank-and-file earned. Well, it’s now 475 times higher and there’s no reason to think it won’t keep rising.

As Sommer puts it, “the sky is no longer the limit.” Yet even that description seems understated.