Who is the highest paid CEO in all of pharma? In this special edition, BioSpace examines top paid CEOs and their pay packages.
Who is the highest paid CEO in all of pharma? To be honest, the 2025 list of top paid chief executives looks a lot like the 2024 list. And that’s no surprise, given the year this CEO oversaw.
Eli Lilly’s David Ricks took home $36.7 million for the year, representing a 26% pay bump over the year prior. He helped the storied pharma along to a 45% revenue increase to $65 billion. Lilly broke the pharma mold in 2025, with its market cap rising 25%, briefly hitting a $1 trillion valuation.
So Ricks has commanded a compensation package to match, with Lilly’s board eager to keep him happy.
David Ricks
- 2025: $36.7
- 2024: $29.2M
- Base Salary: $1.7M
- Stock Awards: $23.3M
Ricks is not alone, with three total pharma CEOs exceeding $30 million in compensation for 2025. The top five is rounded out by J&J’s Joaquin Duato, AbbVie’s Robert Michael, Gilead Sciences’ Daniel O’Day and Pfizer’s Albert Bourla.
See the full list here. We also profiled the top 5 executives and took a deep dive into how the companies’ board justified the pay packages here.
Women in leadership
This year’s list was dominated by men, as per usual, although women weren’t completely absent. GSK’s Emma Walmsley—who stepped down at the end of the year to be replaced by Luke Miels—topped Vertex Pharma’s Reshma Kewalramani as the U.K. pharma undertook an effort to boost its CEO pay to better match peer companies.
Walmsley made $21.2 million, a 55% increase over the year prior when she collected just $13.7 million. Kewalramani saw a slight decrease to $21.1 million.
Emma Walmsley
- 2025: $21.2M
- 2024: $13.7M
- Base Salary: $1.9M
- Stock Awards: $13.6M
BioSpace also examined the pay ratio between CEOs at the top of their companies and the median employee, finding that J&J’s Duato was paid the most relative to rank-and-file staff, with a ratio of 358 to 1. The average J&Jer made $91,000 as compared to Duato’s $32.6 million. Lilly’s Ricks was second with a ratio of 293 to 1.
On the other end of the scale, Vertex’s Kewalramani was paid just 80 times her median employee. The cystic fibrosis drugmaker paid employees the most in 2025, with a median salary of $264,487. Read more.
