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Communication Services: pay and profit in the S&P 500

The smallest sector in the index at 18 companies, and the most extreme in both directions: it contains the two best-paid workforces in the S&P 500 and some of its widest media pay gaps.

Communication Services is the index's smallest sector, and one of its most internally divided. It combines the advertising-funded internet platforms, the telecom carriers, and the traditional media and entertainment groups, businesses with almost nothing in common except a classification.

The platforms

Meta Platforms reports a median employee compensation of $388,200, the highest of any large company in the S&P 500, across 78,865 employees. Alphabet reports $310,826 across 190,820. Maintaining that median at nearly a quarter of a million people is the more remarkable figure, and it produces a ratio of just 33:1, the narrowest of any very large employer in the index.

These medians are total compensation including broad-based equity grants, not salaries. They reflect workforces composed almost entirely of engineers and technical staff at companies whose shares have performed strongly.

Both also generate exceptional profit per employee, Meta at $684,334 and Alphabet at $534,692, and both are among the index's largest absolute profit generators, Alphabet at $102.0 billion and Meta at $54.0 billion. Netflix reaches $523,125 per employee across just 16,000 people, on a median of $211,201 and a ratio of 252:1 that reflects co-CEO compensation averaged across two people.

Media and entertainment: the widest gaps

The traditional media companies look entirely different.

Live Nation tops the sector at 889:1, and it is a denominator story: a median of $33,360 across 17,700 employees, reflecting the large part-time and event-staff population of a live-events business, against a $29.7 million package.

Warner Bros. Discovery at 742:1 is the opposite. Its median of $119,748 is among the best-paid workforces in the sector, and its three-year average CEO compensation of $88.9 million, the largest in the sector, is what produces the ratio. There is no compositional explanation here.

Walt Disney at 694:1 sits between them: a $56,932 median across 231,000 employees, the largest workforce in the sector, including theme-park and resort staff, against a $39.5 million package. Omnicom at 649:1 on $57,337 across 120,000 reflects a global advertising-agency workforce.

TKO Group at 608:1 on an $82,428 median across just 4,000 employees, and T-Mobile at 516:1 on $76,141 across 75,000, round out the wide end. Charter at 427:1 and Comcast at 377:1 on a $92,390 median reflect large field and customer-service workforces at reasonable wages.

The carriers

Verizon at 171:1 on a median of $154,605 is the sector's best-paid large workforce outside the platforms, and one of the narrowest ratios among big employers anywhere in the index. It generates $171,635 of profit per employee across 89,900 people. AT&T and Comcast are the sector's other major profit generators at $15.8 billion and $17.2 billion.

The company that is not here

Take-Two Interactive is an S&P 500 constituent but does not appear on this site. Its chief executive is compensated primarily through an external management company rather than by Take-Two directly, so the Summary Compensation Table records only a small residue of the real arrangement and the disclosed ratio works out at roughly 2:1. The company also averaged a loss across the three-year window, which leaves no profit to measure worker pay against. With neither of Fair500's two measures available, there is nothing meaningful to score, and we would rather omit it than publish a number that describes an accounting structure. Very low ratios usually indicate an unusual pay structure rather than an equitable one.

Two loss-makers

EchoStar and Warner Bros. Discovery each averaged a loss across the three-year window and appear in the map's "lost money" band. Warner Bros. Discovery's is substantial and impairment-driven, which makes its position notable: the sector's largest executive package sits at a company that lost money over the same period.

Every communication services company in the S&P 500

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