Mark Cuban’s employee stock proposal, outlined in a podcast episode published on Thursday, comes against a backdrop of widening CEO-to-worker pay gaps that campaigners say have reached record territory. The billionaire entrepreneur and Oxfam International data tell a consistent story: executives are pulling away from the workers who help create their wealth.
A Pay Gap That Keeps Widening
The numbers behind Cuban’s argument are stark. Average CEO pay at the top 1,500 corporations globally rose from $5.5 million in 2019 to $8.4 million in 2025, a 54% increase in real terms, according to a joint analysis by Oxfam and the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC). At that pace, the average global worker would need 490 years to earn what a typical top-corporation CEO pockets in a single year.
In the United States, the gap is even more pronounced. S&P 500 CEOs are paid an average of 281 times more than the typical worker, according to a September 2025 report by the Economic Policy Institute cited by CNBC, with average total S&P 500 CEO compensation reaching $22.98 million in 2024. That ratio stood at just 60 three and a half decades ago. At the extreme end, four corporations, including Broadcom and Goldman Sachs, paid their CEOs more than $100 million in 2025, and the top ten highest-paid CEOs collectively received over $1 billion, per the Oxfam and ITUC media briefing covering 1,500 corporations across 33 countries.
Meanwhile, average worker pay rose just 0.5% in real terms in 2025, while S&P 500 CEO pay climbed 25.6%, compared with a 1.3% real-terms rise in average hourly earnings for US private-sector workers. Oxfam America has noted that global real wages have fallen 12% since 2019, meaning workers have effectively worked 108 days for free over that period.
Mark Cuban’s Employee Stock Argument: Use the Tax Code
Speaking on the ‘What It Takes’ podcast from Unmoderated News, Cuban argued that equity distribution is the most direct remedy. ‘The way you’re going to reduce income inequality for anybody who works with somebody is making sure they get shares of stock and then they benefit,’ he said.
His proposal goes beyond moral persuasion. Cuban suggested using the corporate tax code to nudge companies into action, rewarding those that share equity broadly with a lower rate. ‘You can give them incentives to say, “Look, if you want that 21% tax rate, then you need to give every single employee the same percentage in stock warrants, options, whatever it may be, of their cash compensation that you give to the CEO,”‘ he said.
He illustrated the mechanism with a concrete example: if a CEO receives stock worth 10% of their cash compensation, every other employee should receive the same proportion of theirs. ‘So if the CEO gets $100,000 worth of stock because they make $1 million in cash, and the janitor makes $50,000, then they deserve, you know, the same percentage in stock, and that will change the game,’ Cuban said. Companies that decline, he added, would face higher taxes: ‘And if you don’t do that, then your taxes go back up.’
‘I would like to see it so that every single CEO/founder/entrepreneur does what I did, which was to give equity to every single employee,’ Cuban said.
He is not making the argument for the first time. Cuban has called for companies to share more of their success with workers for years, pointing to his decision to pay bonuses after every company sale. When Yahoo acquired Broadcast.com in 1999, roughly 300 employees became millionaires as a result.
Cuban is not alone among high-profile entrepreneurs making this case. Elon Musk said in a radio appearance earlier in July that he has ‘always had the philosophy that everyone at the company should receive stock in the company, so that they can participate in the upside of the company.’ Blue Origin is also reportedly revising its equity programme, though employees who join a competitor within 18 months of leaving will forfeit their options.
The AFL-CIO Executive Paywatch data for 2024 shows the CEO-to-worker pay ratio in arts, entertainment and recreation reached 1,924-to-1, the highest of any sector tracked. Whether voluntary pledges from entrepreneurs or a tax-code lever can move that number is the question Cuban’s proposal leaves open, and the next corporate earnings season will provide another data point in the argument.