The Real Trade War: It’s for CEOs, and the Tariffs Are in Equity, Optics, and Outrage

Share This Email:

April 7, 2025

Written by Frank Glassner, CEO Veritas Executive Compensation Consultants

The Real Battlefield Isn’t Global—It’s Corporate

While politicians bicker over trade wars, tariffs, and foreign policy grandstanding, the real global conflict is playing out not on the factory floor—but in the C-suite.

The new battleground? Talent.

The new tariffs? Stock options, retention bonuses, relocation buyouts, PR risk premiums, clawback clauses, social media coaching, and onboarding packages that read like prenups for royalty.

We’re not talking about semiconductors or solar panels here. We’re talking about executive horsepower - those rare, headline-making, boardroom-whispering leaders who can raise a stock price with a single press release or tank it with a poorly timed CNBC interview.

Call it the CEO Talent War: a borderless, zero-sum, high-stakes contest where the spoils go to the boards who understand how to outmaneuver—not just outspend—their rivals.

The New Tariffs of Leadership

And the tariffs? They're self-imposed:

• The Golden Parachute Tariff: Every time a failed CEO floats away with $40 million and a consulting gig.
• The Say-on-Pay Tax: Paid in shareholder ire and front-page headlines.
• The Glassdoor Surcharge: When reputational damage comes with a five-star spin strategy.
• The TikTok Premium: Because a CEO’s daughter just danced away $2B in market cap.
• The ESG Toll: Scored in symbols, judged in tweets, and priced into compensation by Monday.
• The Proxy Advisor Levy: That invisible hand of ISS and Glass Lewis, shaping packages with the passive-aggressive power of a thousand spreadsheets.
• The Activist Investor Import Duty: When your new comp plan has to please a hedge fund that holds 0.3% of shares and 110% of the noise.
• The Comp Committee Kafka Fee: For navigating a six-meeting cycle to approve a performance metric that everyone knows is symbolic.
• The Deferred Equity Detention Tax: When your payout is linked to a three-year TSR cliff and market conditions only Warren Buffett could predict.
• The Comp-on-Page-42 Surtax: Because it doesn’t count unless it’s footnoted, cross-referenced, and subject to one-time, non-GAAP-adjusted EBITDA add-backs.
• The "CEO-as-Politician" Tariff: The price of maintaining a LinkedIn presence more curated than a presidential memoir.

Together, they form the invisible fiscal border wall around leadership—a matrix of expectations and landmines that even the most brilliant CEO must navigate like they’re starring in a real-time governance obstacle course.

The Unicorn Standard—and the Hidden Cost of Shame

Meanwhile, boards are expected to land “unicorn” leaders who possess the strategic chops of Satya Nadella, the storytelling magic of Tim Cook, the social agility of Indra Nooyi, and the crisis reflexes of Captain Sully—all while getting paid less than their private equity cousin across the street. And even when they earn it, the payout often comes with a side of shame.

The Ones Who Earn Every Penny

Let’s talk about a few of the CEOs who actually earn it:

• Mary Barra at General Motors, steering the automaker into the electric future while juggling legacy infrastructure, union negotiations, and the minefield of stakeholder expectations.
• Ken Frazier, who led Merck with not just business acumen, but moral courage—exiting presidential councils, challenging systemic bias, and still outperforming benchmarks.
• Pat Gelsinger at Intel, back in the saddle and rebooting a tech titan while the market second-guesses every nanometer.
• Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan Chase—a wartime consigliere in a pinstripe suit, navigating banking crises, regulatory gauntlets, and populist backlash, all while delivering returns that would make an algorithm blush.
• Jensen Huang of NVIDIA, who went from graphics chips to AI gold, building a company that now powers the future of computing.
• Lisa Su at AMD, whose turnaround playbook belongs in the business school Hall of Fame—and who did it with less capital and fewer headlines than her silicon neighbors.
• Nick Howley and Kevin Stein of TransDigm—visionaries who built shareholder value with brutal focus, strategic discipline, and compensation programs that would make a Swiss watch look imprecise. Real value creation, real rewards, and zero apologies.

These are the CEOs who do more than justify their comp—they rewrite the rulebook on what leadership should look like in the 21st century.

What It Takes to Compete

Let’s get real. The market for elite executive leadership is more global, more competitive, and more demanding than ever. If boards think they can “bargain” their way into world-class leadership with a vanilla comp plan and a soft sell, they’ll be left watching their would-be CEO take a counteroffer before dessert.

And it’s not just about the size of pay. It’s about structure. Design. Timing. Line of sight. Alignment. You can’t just throw RSUs at the problem and hope for the best. The smartest packages are crafted like modern diplomacy: layered, strategic, and quietly fierce.

Yet hovering over it all like a cloud of fiscal judgment are the likes of ISS, Glass Lewis, CalPERS, CII, CalSTRS, Dimensional, and the NY State Common Retirement Fund—each with their own scorecards, screens, and spreadsheets. They don’t sit at the table, but they get the final word on whether your CEO’s comp package deserves a “yea,” a “nay,” or a splashy rebuke on Page One.

Where Veritas Comes In

And here’s where we do it the Veritas way.

We don’t just design compensation. We architect competitive advantage—one decision, one data point, one boardroom pivot at a time. We tailor programs that align pay with performance, resilience with risk, and purpose with precision. Where others see limits—compliance hurdles, political landmines, governance fatigue—we see an open field for innovation, integrity, and intelligent design.

Veritas is where contrarian thinking meets elegant execution. While others recycle best practices, we challenge their very premise. We ask: Why not flip the model? What if retention started with inspiration? What if governance could drive—not dilute—boldness? And what if the best way to attract a visionary isn’t by replicating what’s been done, but by offering what’s never been imagined?

The Veritas approach means no template thinking, no recycled plans, no check-the-box appeasement. It means reading the fine print and rewriting it when necessary. It means navigating ISS and Glass Lewis without bowing to them. It means crafting packages that attract the next Barra, Frazier, or Nadella—then keeping them inspired, aligned, and performing like the boardroom legends they are.

Because in this trade war, the spoils don’t go to the loudest bidder.

They go to the most brilliant, audaciously creative, and unflinchingly prepared—the boards and advisors willing to think differently, act decisively, and build compensation architectures as bold as the leaders they seek to attract.

FBG

**********************************************************************

Frank Glassner is the CEO of Veritas Executive Compensation Consultants and a widely respected authority on executive pay and strategic compensation design. Known for his discerning judgment, consummate diplomacy, incisive insights, and unwavering discretion, he is a trusted advisor and confidant to boards, CEOs, and institutional investors worldwide.