In May 2022, the median pay for the chief executives (CEOs) of the UK’s Top 100 companies was £3.6 million a year. These people (mostly men) have the job for about 5 years. And in that time may make just one significant ‘strategic’ (see Box 1) decision. Could that one decision be worth the salary they are paid over those 5 years? Yes, it could.
In 2018, Whitbread plc sold Costa Coffee to Coca-Cola for £3.9 billion. Since then, post-Covid working from home has made it much harder to make money from coffee bars — the sale looks to have been clever. In 2022, Elon Musk ’s US$44 billion bid for Twitter looked odd, and then his withdrawal from the bid left him open to huge claims for compensation in US courts. Musk made a dreadful strategic decision.
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