Listed below are five of the lowest ranking companies across our product guides.
All these companies score poorly across our rating system for failing to address issues including human rights, animal rights and environmental concerns.
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While many workers supplying big brands do not earn enough to live a decent life, company executives often receive extravagant sums of money each year.
Many of these companies are using up the planet’s resources, and face criticism for carbon emissions and their impacts on the environment. Yet, profits end up in CEOs’ (Chief Executive Officers') pockets instead of being reinvested to reduce the company’s environmental impacts or pay their workers fairly.
Sectors with the highest CEO pay
Our research shows that the technology sector is the most likely to pay extremely high amounts to company directors.
But payments above £10m annually were found in all sectors, including food and drink, health and beauty, entertainment, travel, energy, money, retailers and fashion and clothing.
Which brands pay the highest amounts?
Below we list a selection of brands that are paying executives large amounts of compensation; we focus on those with operations in the UK that are consumer-facing.
These figures show what the single highest paid director in each company received in total compensation in a given year.
The highest paid executive was Elon Musk at Tesla: in 2025 shareholders voted to approve a pay package to him of £750m ($1USD trillion) to be paid over the next 10 years.
In the lists below, unless a source link is included, all research is taken from Ethical Consumer’s corporate research database which uses company annual reports or corporate information databases for remuneration data. This list is based largely on companies that Ethical Consumer has researched while producing its ethical shopping guides. As Ethical Consumer hasn’t rated all companies in each sector, it’s possible other companies within the named sectors pay higher rates to CEOs.
Technology sector
The tech industry has the highest remuneration for a single individual.
| Company | Amount |
|---|---|
| Tesla | £760bn over the next 10 years (2025) |
| Alphabet (Google and YouTube) | £518.1m over the next three years (2025) |
| Microsoft | £62.9m (2023) |
Apple |
£56m (2024) |
| Adobe | £39.1m (2024) |
| Uber | £29.6m (2024) |
| Xiaomi | £29m (2023) |
| Ford Motor Company | £19m (2024) |
| Lenovo Group | £15.4m (2024) |
| HP Inc | £15.3m (2023) |
| Rolls Royce | £13.6m (2024) |
