The CEOs of Colorado’s highest paying publicly traded companies. (BusinessDen illustration)
Having the largest IPO in Colorado tech history is good for the wallet.
Bryan Leach, the founder and CEO of couponing app Ibotta, was Colorado’s highest paid executive among publicly traded companies in 2024, according to recent filings with the Securities & Exchange Commission.
The vast majority of Leach’s nearly $29 million package came from stock awards, which were unusually high following his firm’s $660 million public offering in April 2024.
Each spring and summer, most publicly traded companies have to file proxy statements disclosing compensation paid to their top executives the previous year. Those amounts include base salary, bonuses, cash incentives and the value of stock options, plus other perks like trips on the corporate jet.
BusinessDen used these proxy documents to compile a list of the top 25 paid executives in the Denver metro.
Leach made $494,000 in base salary and got a performance bonus of about $480,500. The remainder of his $29 million in compensation came in the form of Ibotta stock. It was a huge jump for Leach. In 2023, he made just shy of $2 million, with about $700,000 coming in stock.
The company dishing out the second-most amount to its top executive last year was Douglas County-based Liberty Media, which paid CEO Greg Maffei $24 million, down from almost $29 million in 2023.
Most of Maffei’s 2024 compensation came in bonuses and stock awards. He received a $1.6 million base salary and a $1.7 million increase in the value of his pension.
Maffei stepped down at the beginning of this year. But in 2024, he also led Liberty Media spin-off Liberty Broadband. When you factor in Maffei’s $9 million paycheck there, he technically jumps ahead of Ibotta’s Leach with a $33 million package.
Between the two roles, the former head of Formula 1’s parent company also got $830,000 worth of personal use of the “corporate aircraft,” down from $884,000 in 2023.
Perks like those are often listed in companies’ proxies under the “other” category. Others include car allowances, tax preparation services, executive wellness programs, country club dues and personal security fees.
Palantir CEO Alex Karp, whose $4.6 million pay package just missed the top 25 cut, was a big beneficiary of this category. The leader of Colorado’s largest company by market capitalization received $1.85 million for chartered flights and just over $1 million in personal security costs, documents show.
In one of the more creative ways to pay, Innospec CEO Patrick Williams got $39,000 in the form of a suite at Folsom Field to watch his alma mater University of Colorado Buffs play football last fall.
Javier Rodriguez, who helms the dialysis firm DaVita, finished third in the total pay rankings with a package of $22 million. About $16 million of that came from stock awards on top of his $1.5 million base salary. Rodriguez, who became DaVita’s CEO in 2019, didn’t receive any stock awards for compensation until this year.
From left: Javier Rodriguez of DaVita, Liberty Media’s Greg Maffei and Ibotta’s Bryan Leach. (BusinessDen illustration)
Of the 25 CEOs on the list, the mean increase in compensation packages was 10.7% from 2023 to 2024. Seven CEOs on the list saw a decline in the value of their pay packages in 2024.
The group as a whole received a combined $320.6 million in total compensation for the year, an average of $12.8 million per exec.
And Inspirato CEO Payam Zamani showed that base salary isn’t everything. Zamani, who took over the luxury travel company mid-2024, made just $1 — that’s a single dollar — in that category for the year, although his total compensation ended up being $1.8 million.
Zamani is the majority shareholder in Inspirato, which will soon combine with the fellow Zamani-owned firm Buyerlink and trade under the name One Planet Platforms.
