Path to Fortune 500 CEO: College, Career, and Strategy

Engineering undergraduates dominate Fortune 500 CEOs, followed by MBA grads from Ivy League schools.

### How to Become a Fortune 500 CEO
* 💰 Fortune 500 CEOs are known for earning staggering amounts of money, with the top 350 CEOs in the US making **over 24 million dollars on average in 2020**.
* 🎓 Every single non-founding Fortune 500 CEO has a college degree, and **almost 10% of them went to Harvard**, making it a popular choice.
* 🎓 41 of Fortune 500 CEOs have an MBA, with Ivy League MBA programs being highly beneficial due to the **valuable connections made there**.
* 🎓 97 of the Fortune 500 CEOs studied engineering as undergraduates, as engineers are **highly valued in the business world**.
* 🚀 One strategy to become a Fortune 500 CEO is to work with promising startups, while the other strategy involves starting your career in established companies and **climbing the corporate ladder**.
* 🏫 Attending a top business school like Harvard for an MBA is a common step towards becoming a **Fortune 500 CEO**.
* 👤 Personal branding plays a crucial role in reaching the C-suite, with top CEOs often hiring **public relations consultants to enhance their image**.
* 🎲 Even if you follow all the steps correctly, the chances of becoming a **Fortune 500 CEO** are around **1%**.

there's never been actually data like this before. We've never known what CEOs actually do, and now we have some really rich data that we can dig into. Fortune 500 CEOs consistently make headlines for making more money in a single year than most of us could hope to earn in our entire lives. In 2020, the top 350 CEOs in the US made over 24 million dollars on average. That means at my current salary, I'd have to work over, I don't know, 281 years to make what they made in one year. Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, was awarded 853 million dollars in total compensation for his work in 2021. Mr. Tim Apple wasn't even the biggest earner last year. Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe took home 2.3 billion dollars in total compensation. Good morning, Joe. Lots of comparisons now between Elon Musk and Rivian founder RJ Scaringe, but while Musk owns more than 20 percent of Tesla.

RJ owns only about 1.7% of Rivia now. RJ is now a billionaire, and the one and only Elon Musk was awarded more than 10 billion dollars in Tesla options. Stop if you don't like it, suppose so, yeah. I mean from the money that you sell all your stuff, you could buy new stuff. Perhaps these two are a little more deserving because they were the founders or very early personal investors in highly risky companies utilizing unproven technology, but most CEOs didn't take such personal risk, and many are still enjoying nine-figure salaries. That is not my fault. This isn't another video to complain about how unfair it is that the average Fortune 500 CEO is now earning more than 324 times the median employee at their company. We have all heard it before, and it doesn't look like it's going to change anytime soon, no matter how much the internet complains about it. Now would be a good time to remember the age-old anecdote: if you can't

beat them, join them. So, it's time to learn how money works to get yourself a step-by-step guide on landing a job as an egregiously overcompensated corporate fat CEO. This week's lesson was brought to you by Helix, and you will need a good night's sleep if you want to become a CEO. For a while, I had told myself the reason I didn't sleep well was simply because I was stressed and that it came with the territory of being an investment banker. Since I quit that job, I still haven't been able to get a good night's sleep. That is until I got my Helix mattress. Everybody is different, and Helix knows that, so they made a sleep quiz that matches your unique body type and sleep preferences to the perfect mattress for you. As a side sleeper who prefers a mattress that's not too hard, not too soft, medium feel, the quiz suggested the Midnight Luxe king mattress was the right one for me. It provides luxury memory foam for pressure point relief on my hips and

shoulders, so I don't feel like I've injured 
myself when I wake up in the morning. I even got   the glacio attacks cooling cover on my mattress 
and it keeps me cool when I sleep. I've had my   Helix sleep for a month now, and I am shocked 
with how much different my sleep experience has   been with it. I recommended it to my parents, and 
they took the Helix sleep quiz, and now have one   too. The best part of all of this is that Helix 
delivers your mattress right to your door with   free shipping in the US. The mattress comes rolled 
up in a box and is super easy to set up yourself. If it makes you nervous to buy something you 
haven't tried, Helix has a 100-night sleep trial,   so you'll get more than three months to make sure 
that you love it. If you don't, they'll pick it up   for you, and you'll get a full refund. Plus, Helix 
mattresses have a 10-year warranty, and they even

offer financing options and flexible payment 
plans, so a great night's sleep is never far away. Helix sleep makes mattresses and bedding that 
are customized to fit your needs and conveniently shipped right to your door. I love my Helix 
and I think you would too. If you are looking for a new bed, check out Helix. You can click on 
the link below or go to helixsleep.com/ how many works and get up to $200 off your 
Helix mattress, plus two free pillows. Of the 500 
CEOs on the Fortune magazine's list, only 21 were 
the founders or co-founders of the companies they 
lead. So, if you want the abbreviated step-by-step 
guide, then step one: start a multi-billion dollar 
company and don't get fired by the board or retire. 
Congratulations, you're now a Fortune 500 CEO. That 
Was Easy. By the time you have completed step 
one of this guide, you will probably already 
be a billionaire, so maybe the thought of a day 
job, however well-compensated, might have lost its

appeal anyway. 21 out of 500 is pretty bad odds, so let's go for the more involved but safer set of instructions. The remaining 479 chief executive officers got their jobs by working their way up through corporate roles, which starts with college. I know my video last week was all about thinking twice before committing to a college degree, but if you want the top job at one of these companies, a degree is mandatory. Every single non-founding CEO of a Fortune 500 company has a college degree. Out of the 21 founding CEOs, 16 of them have at least a bachelor's degree, and the remaining five, like Mark Zuckerberg, dropped out of schools like Harvard because their businesses started taking off before they could finish their degree. I know the story of a high school dropout starting a successful company is popular, but the numbers don't lie. If you want to get to this level, you need to go to college. Society has rules, and the first rule is you go to college if you want to have.

a happy and successful life. You go to college if 
you want to be somebody. You go to college if you   want to fit in. You also need 
to go to a good college. Almost 10 percent of   the list of non-founding CEOs went to just one 
particular school. That's right, DeVry University. Yeah, no, obviously it was Harvard. The other Ivy 
League schools are very well represented in this   group of CEOs as well. Once you get into one of 
these schools, you need to pick what to study. 41 of Fortune 500 CEOs have an MBA, which is a 
Masters of Business Administration, so that's   a solid pick. MBA programs focus on business 
structures, corporate governance, and the rules   of executives and organizations, so it makes sense 
that this is a top pick. A lot of companies will   actually make their senior executives complete 
an MBA part-time while working their regular   hours. It's a grueling task on top of the regular 
commitments of a corporate executive, but sometimes

the companies actually pay for their Executives to get these degrees because of how valuable they can be. In addition to the lessons you learn about the general mechanics of running a company, the connections you can make at an ivy league are worth the tuition costs themselves. So many powerful and influential people coming from these schools creates a self-fulfilling prophecy of more people coming from these schools because they spent their time there interacting with powerful and influential people. So if you want to be a fortune fan 500 CEO, your best chance will come from getting into an Ivy League MBA program and networking like crazy while you're there. But an MBA is a master's degree. Master's degrees are postgraduate degrees, which means you need to get an undergraduate or bachelor's degree first. Picking the right degree straight out of high school might feel like a bit of a crap shoot, but Fortune 500 CEOs overwhelmingly favor one type of

degree above the others. You might think this would 
be a business, finance, or economics degree, but you   would be wrong. 97 of the 500 CEOs on this list 
studied engineering as an undergraduate. There is   some selection bias to this. Engineering is a tough 
degree to get into, and unlike law or medicine, it   does not have a narrow path of progression. But 
Engineers are still a highly prized asset in the   business world. Fortune 500 CEO Engineers who were 
interviewed about their careers admitted that they   chose to study engineering because it had the 
lowest unemployment rates and great options for   career advancement. People that are thinking like 
that at the age of 18 are people that will go on   to lead Fortune 500 companies, and people 
like that pick engineering. We hire great Engineers   as fast as we can find them. Engineers are trained 
to be good with numbers and complicated sets of   information, but they are also trained to use their 
skills to complete projects while collaborating.

with other people with differing expertise. Engineers are also quite valuable to startups as early technical employees. The list of Fortune 500 companies is dominated by businesses that were once startups not very long ago, and early employees with the right skills are prime candidates for the top job once the founder steps down. The school you complete your bachelor's degree at is much less important than the school you get your MBA from. The most represented undergraduate school amongst the Fortune 500 CEOs was Stanford, but only three of them went for their bachelor's degree, with the rest of the list spread out amongst more than 300 other schools. So just go to the best school you can and work on being near the top of your class, which will make Step 2 a lot easier. The average age of a Fortune 500 CEO is 57, so don't worry. Once you have graduated from your engineering degree, you have plenty of time to work on your career to get yourself into a Harvard MBA.

if you want to be the CEO of a big company, you have two options. Option one is to start working with promising startups. If you hitch your wagon to the next Google or Amazon, you will be a prime contender for the top job, and you would have likely picked up some stock options along the way. According to the New York Times, the average net worth of the first 2,200 Microsoft employees is over 10 million dollars. So even if they never made CEO, they shouldn't ever need to work again. This strategy is very risky because for every Microsoft, there are thousands of other businesses with 2,200 employees that don't grow at all or even worse, end up going bankrupt. To increase your chances of making this strategy work, you should target a business with around 1,000 employees, with good institutional backing from a private equity firm, and operating in a field with a lot of room for growth. Tech, finance, healthcare, and direct-to-consumer are all good.

options. Once you land that first job, you gotta do the hard part, which is work like crazy, outlast the other employees, hope the company does well, and be in the right place at the right time when the founder steps back and needs a new CEO. If you want to take a more active approach at landing the top job, then you should start your career off in a more established company, preferably one with a good amount of business pedigree. Bulge bracket investment banks like Goldman and high-end management consulting firms like McKinsey should be your top pick. I'll explain why later, but the competition for graduate programs at these companies is fierce, so if you can't get in here, almost any big company will do. Your mission at this stage is to get to an executive-level role as quickly as possible. Doing good work is critical to this, but it will only get you so far. You need to market yourself in every way that you can to become your own brand name in the industry. Social

media, if used correctly, can be great for this. My good friend Richard, over at The Plain Bagel, works as an investment analyst, but he is well known outside of his firm because of his YouTube channel. Now, you don't have to take it that far, but putting yourself out there will mean that you can make it a lot easier for you to jump between jobs as you skip up the corporate ladder. Internal promotions are slow and difficult to get in most large companies. The average employee that switches employers every two years earns fifty percent more than the average employee that stays around for longer. If you do a good job of marketing yourself inside your industry, you are more likely to walk into a job interview where the recruiter already knows about you or something good you have done, which is a huge advantage over the regular schmuck with less than 500 connections on their LinkedIn profile. You can also fast-track this process. The reason working at a top investment banker

management consulting firm is a good place to start, is because you can work two years at one of these institutions as an analyst and gain more experience than you would in a decade at a regular company. Recruiters know this, so the exit opportunities for bankers and consultants can be extremely good, and you can often score an executive-level role before you are 30. The traditional route would be to go from an analyst to a team lead to a manager, and then finally on to an executive, which will take a lot more time unless you get lucky with your job switching. A word of advice based on my own experience and no further research at all is that if you do want to go the investment banking or consulting route, you should avoid an exit into tech companies. Even if you are an engineer by education, you should be able to land a good job with these outfits, but it will be difficult to move up because the culture of these businesses tends to look down with their

soy lattes and on tap kombucha on the old school 
business Bros who totally don't even know how to   hacky sack. A better plan is to get a job at a big 
company that is really boring. A boring company is   going to have less young talent, which means you 
won't be competing against every other hotshot   career-driven 30-year-old to get an executive 
position. Once you have worked yourself into a   role where you are overseeing at least 200 other 
employees, it's time again to start thinking about   that Harvard MBA. Personal branding is again going 
to play a big role in getting you into this highly   coveted course. Harvard and other Ivy League 
schools like to brag about how many presidents,   Supreme Court Justices, and Fortune 500 CEOs went 
to their schools, and the best way for them to   maintain those bragging rights is to only educate 
people who their mission office thinks is likely   to go on to be a president, Supreme Court Justice, 
or Fortune 500 CEO. If you can talk confidently and

provide proof to an admissions officer about how you have reshaped your industry. You are a lot more likely to get in. You will also need to do the GMAT, which is a test to assess your business acumen. If you seriously want to be a Fortune 500 CEO, this is just one of many tests you would have taken in your career, so study hard and you should ace it. Once you have received your MBA from Harvard, life should be pretty good for you. The average salary of a Harvard MBA in their first year after graduation is $207,000, and that figure should be significantly higher if you go back into an industry where you already have executive experience. Your next goal is the c-suite, and to get there in a Fortune 500 company, you're going to need to double down on that personal branding. At this level, it is not unusual for individuals to hire the help of public relations consultants to arrange for them to give speeches and appear in media, so they are appealing to high-end recruiters.

but also to company directors and shareholders, who ultimately have the final say over who gets to be the chief executive. Top CEOs do earn a lot of money, and no, they don't work 320 times harder than the average worker, but they do have the potential to make or lose investors a lot more money than 320 regular employees ever could. Part of that is just branding. If an executive that the general public sees on the news every morning is announced as a new CEO of a company, it can boost the share price significantly. The other side of that is if somebody that nobody has ever heard of is announced, then it will raise a lot of questions about who is leading the company, even if that person is just as technically competent as a person with a PR team behind them. Even if you do absolutely everything right, you still probably have about a one percent chance at best at becoming the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, but that's okay. Even if you stray away from this.

exact path. You are still going to be making a lot 
of money and working in a very exciting role, but it will come at a huge personal cost. You have to 
decide if long hours for years on end are worth it for the chance to have your salary ridiculed by 
every Congressman proposing a new tax bill because oh yeah, that's right. If you do end up becoming the 
CEO of a public company, your income will become public record. So if you wouldn't feel comfortable 
putting up your paycheck on Facebook, maybe the job isn't for you after all. We enjoy the right to 
keep our personal finances private, which makes you wonder how we work out how rich the billionaires 
these CEOs will be working for actually are. If you want to find out frankly scary strategies that 
journalists use to work out how much someone is worth to make their billionaires list, go and 
watch my video on why net worth lists are complete nonsense. Thanks again to Helix for making it 
possible to keep on learning how money works.

If You Want To Be a CEO Become An Engineer First - How Money Works

Subscribe to learn about business, careers, and everything else about How Money Works.

How Money Works

The Extravagant Salaries of Fortune 500 CEOs

Fortune 500 CEOs made an average of over 24 million dollars in 2020, with top earners like Tim Cook and RJ Scaringe taking home hundreds of millions to billions of dollars in total compensation.

While some CEOs may be considered deserving due to personal risk and early investment, many others continue to enjoy extremely high salaries, sparking ongoing controversy.

The exorbitant earnings of CEOs, often hundreds of times more than the median employee at their company, show no sign of decreasing, leading to suggestions that the best way to address the issue is to understand and pursue a career path towards becoming a highly overcompensated corporate CEO.

The Helix Sleep Experience and CEO Success Guide

Helix offers customized mattresses with a 100-night sleep trial and 10-year warranty, plus financing options.

The company also provides a step-by-step guide to becoming a Fortune 500 CEO, highlighting the importance of a college degree for corporate success.

College education is shown to be a common factor among non-founding CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, emphasizing its significance in career advancement.

Attending a prestigious university, especially an Ivy League school, significantly increases the chance of becoming a Fortune 500 CEO, with many of them holding an MBA.

However, before obtaining a master's degree, a bachelor's degree in engineering is favored among Fortune 500 CEOs, as it provides valuable skills and career opportunities in the business world.

Engineers are highly sought after for their ability to work with complex information and collaborate on projects, making them ideal candidates for leadership roles.

The school where you get your MBA is more crucial than your undergraduate degree for becoming a Fortune 500 CEO.

Working for a promising startup or starting in a reputable, established company are the two main pathways to aim for.

Targeting a business with around 1,000 employees, strong institutional backing, and operating in a growing field can increase the chances of success in the startup route.

Starting your career in a prestigious company, such as a bulge bracket investment bank or high-end management consulting firm, and aiming for an executive-level role as quickly as possible, is another effective pathway to the top.

Leveraging Media and Job Mobility for Career Advancement

Using media for self-promotion can facilitate job changes and career progression, with regular job switches leading to higher earnings.

Starting at a top investment bank or management consulting firm can provide valuable experience and lead to executive-level roles at a young age.

Avoiding a transition to tech companies and aiming for a leadership position in a less competitive, boring company can increase the chances of reaching an executive role.

Personal branding and a strong professional network are crucial for gaining admission to top-tier MBA programs and advancing towards leadership positions.

Studying hard and excelling in the GMAT is crucial for getting into a top business school like Harvard.

Graduating with an MBA from Harvard can lead to a high first-year salary, especially if you have executive experience.

Personal branding and public relations play a significant role in reaching the c-suite, as CEOs have the potential to greatly impact investors and share prices.

Despite the low odds, pursuing the CEO position in a Fortune 500 company can be financially rewarding but comes with a significant personal cost and loss of privacy.