Might 5, 2025
Cornell solely earned $9.9 million in 2024 — a forty five% drop from 2023 and the bottom since 2016.
A brand new report revealed that Goal CEO Brian Cornell’s wage dropped 87% from his compensation peak of $77.5 million in 2020, the Minnesota Star Tribune studies.
Cornell solely earned $9.9 million in 2024 — a forty five% drop from 2023 and the bottom since 2016. With a wage of $1,400,000, he additionally acquired a bonus price $785,400. Nevertheless, the decline in fee highlights the monetary struggles that the Minneapolis-based retailer has suffered lately, along with political backlash.
Goal fell in need of annual efficiency targets in 2023 and missed a fair wider margin in 2024. Model executives seemingly obtain fairness awards for medium-term efficiency over three years in correlation with their colleagues. Through the 2022-2024 efficiency interval, the retailer’s efficiency fell in need of gross sales, earnings, and return on particular invested capital gross sales objectives.
Consequently, Goal leaders earned 61.6% of the mixed objective.
For Cornell, he acquired $5.5 million from these performance-based fairness awards; in 2023, he earned $13.6 million. If the corporate underperforms on objectives, because it did, the pay could possibly be much less.
Pay for Cornell and fellow Goal leaders might lower much more amid backlash from the corporate’s controversial dial-back on DEI and President Donald Trump’s rising tariffs. Goal’s DEI announcement resulted in a large boycott from Black and different customers after a name to motion from civil rights leaders. Cornell and Rev. Al Sharpton met to come back to frequent floor, and the chief referred to the dialog as “constructive and candid.”
Sharpton and Rev. Jamal Bryant known as for the boycott after the retailer formally ended its three-year-long DEI objectives in January 2025, shortly after Trump took workplace, concentrating on range, fairness, and inclusion initiatives. After Cornell introduced that the model would now not ship firm studies and information to exterior diversity-focused teams such because the Human Rights Marketing campaign’s Company Index, shops nationwide skilled declining site visitors and gross sales.
Catering to Trump’s techniques might have some adversarial penalties, as Cornell accused incoming tariffs on merchandise from Mexico of getting grave results on the worth of vegatables and fruits bought in shops. In accordance with the Day by day Beast, Cornell mentioned prospects “will possible see worth will increase over the subsequent couple of days.” “If there’s a 25 p.c tariff, these costs will go up,” he mentioned in March 2025.
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