The COVID-19 pandemic presented a once-in-a-generation challenge for the medtech industry, and many of the CEOs on this list met it head-on.
While their bread-and-butter businesses took major hits, they deftly redirected resources and stepped up operations to help meet the world’s clamoring demand for diagnostic tests, ventilators and other critical equipment needed to fight COVID-19.
For navigating through those tempestuous times—and in some cases, strengthening their companies' balance sheets and driving growth through M&A—some scored major payouts. Others, however, saw their pay increase by only a slim margin.
Guardant Health CEO Helmy Eltoukhy most certainly landed in the first category. The co-founder of the liquid biopsy company saw his total compensation jump about 12,300%, with stock awards rocketing it from below $1 million to well over $100 million.
Masimo chief Joe Kiani, on the other hand, saw his take-home rise by just over 3%, despite pushing the patient-monitoring company’s revenues past the billion-dollar mark for the first time in its 30-year history.
During the earliest stages of the pandemic, the success of some medtech companies was far from certain. Labcorp and Quest Diagnostics chiefs Adam Schechter and Stephen Rusckowski saw their companies’ stock prices take major hits in the first weeks of the coronavirus’ U.S. spread, as investors feared that the nascent market for COVID tests would not be enough to cover the money lost from declining demand for routine testing.
But those companies' shares recovered quickly and went on to post new records after it became clear that test providers—as well as diagnostic developers such as Thermo Fisher Scientific and Abbott—stood to make billions, and would continue to do so as their base businesses rebounded.
RELATED: Fierce Pharma’s top 15 highest-paid biopharma CEOs of 2020
As was the case with Fierce’s list of best-paid biopharma CEOs, no women made it onto our top 10 list this year (or the top 15, for that matter). Read on for detailed breakdowns of the take-home pay of the highest-paid medtech CEOs, and how their companies may be spending their COVID-19 windfalls.