Whenever I imagine UAW President Shawn Fain, he’s wearing his infamous “Eat The Rich” t-shirt. It’s the one he sported during his union’s 2023 “Stand Up” strike—a labor action where, instead of targeting one automaker to settle a contract, union workers conducted escalating walkouts across GM, Ford, and Stellantis.
“Eat the Rich” and “Tax the Rich” are the sophomoric rallying cries of professed populists like Fain and New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. (Lest we forget AOC wearing a pricey designer dress to the MET Gala bearing the latter message.) Sporting clothing bearing populist slogans makes for great media theater and social media engagement, but it accomplishes little beyond attention.
As someone who continuously rails about wealth disparity in America, one might expect I’d applaud Fain’s and AOC’s antics. I don’t.
My issue with wealth disparity is a rigged system once known as the “Old Boys Club” that has since been widened to include women. It’s an elite club that ensures the enrichment of CEOs too often at the expense of their workers—individuals who typically further enrich themselves while in the “service” of major corporate boards.
GM CEO Mary Barra, who also chairs the automaker’s board, and the directors who signed off on her record nearly $30 million 2025 payday, embody the modern day “Old Boys and Girls Club.”
The System Behind the Pay
GM just disclosed the compensation the board awarded Barra for her 2025 performance: $29,895,868—up from $29,496,637 the prior year. The modest percentage increase alone isn’t the issue; the financial hocus pocus used to justify Barra’s riches is.
When President Trump took over in 2025 and made good on his promise to impose tariffs, GM’s board immediately moved to ensure that any financial harm the automaker sustained wouldn’t adversely impact the metrics used to determine Barra’s bonus. The board wasn’t bothered that Barra boosted GM’s manufacturing in Mexico almost immediately upon her friend Joe Biden assuming office in 2021.
Just months after Biden’s inauguration, GM announced a $1 billion investment to prepare its Ramos Arizpe complex in Mexico for electric vehicle production. The UAW had a few choice words about that decision.
“At a time when General Motors is asking for a significant investment by the U.S. government in subsidizing electric vehicles, this is a slap in the face for not only UAW members and their families but also for U.S. taxpayers and the American workforce,” said Terry Dittes, then head of the union’s GM Department.
Given that GM was bailed out by U.S. and Canadian taxpayers, Barra apparently never feared the optics of moving more jobs to Mexico, where GM is currently the country’s largest auto producer and exporter, employing some 25,000 workers.
GM’s board justified Barra’s compensation bump by excluding the automaker’s losses tied to tariffs when evaluating the company’s profitability as part of executive bonuses, according to GM’s U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filings and first reported by Detroit News reporter Summer Ballentine.
The board’s explanation for insulating Barra from those losses was laid out in a letter to shareholders.
“Importantly, this approach established an outlook for the range of potential policy change impacts on the business (both positive and negative) and encouraged our leadership team to pursue active and deliberate actions to respond to these impacts where possible to serve the best interests of the Company and our shareholders,” GM compensation committee Chairperson Devin N. Wenig said in the letter.
“To respond to these impacts where possible to serve the best interests of the Company and our shareholders?” Any credible corporate governance expert will tell you that every decision made by the CEO of a publicly traded company should serve the best interests of their company and shareholders.
GM’s board excluded the downside from tariffs when determining Barra’s compensation but didn’t make similar adjustments for the benefits GM received from regulatory relief under the Trump administration, including the easing of costly fuel efficiency requirements—standards that particularly benefited GM, whose vehicles rank among the least fuel efficient in the industry.
Moving the Goalposts
Barra and the board she leads apparently weren’t concerned about the optics of GM’s salaried and hourly workers receiving significantly lower 2025 bonuses because of Barra’s EV and China misadventures, for which GM was forced to take more than $7 billion in write-offs.
GM’s salaried and hourly workers were forced to play by the rules, meaning they received significantly diminished bonuses because they were based on GM’s actual results—no special exclusions for them.
Let’s not forget that 2025 was the year Barra previously declared GM would be selling more EVs in the U.S. than Tesla.
UAW president Shawn “Eat the Rich” Fain previously hailed President Trump’s tariffs but didn’t respond to Ballentine’s request for a comment on how Barra was insulated from the pain his dues-paying members suffered because of the measures.
Indications are that GM’s Barra-chaired board has consistently moved the goalposts to ensure Barra didn’t suffer any financial repercussions for her mistaken strategies. In an April earnings call four years ago, Barra told analysts that GM’s compensation packages going forward would take into account EV volumes, EV quality, and details related to new EV launch timing.
“At GM, our compensation has always been driven by the company’s success. And no one should doubt our commitment to lead in EVs or the passion our team has for that mission,” Barra told analysts.
When Performance Doesn’t Matter
Crain’s Detroit Business reported this week that GM is indefinitely shelving its next-generation electric truck program—including the Escalade IQ and the EV Hummer—and redirecting resources back to gas and hybrid vehicles. It signals an undeniable unwinding of Barra’s much-hyped EV strategy, previously underscored by the staggering fourth-quarter write-offs.
Barra’s compensation has steadily risen since she assumed command in 2014. If EVs were supposed to determine Barra’s compensation, she would have taken a massive hit last year. Barra’s pay was immediately inflated upon being named CEO; her initial pay package represented a 60% increase over what her highly regarded predecessor, Dan Akerson, earned in his final year on the job.
To date, Barra has been awarded approximately $285.4 million in compensation during her tenure as CEO.
GM’s Barra-chaired board also ignored other alarming setbacks when determining her payout. Last year, GM recalled more than 720,000 of its most profitable trucks and SUVs equipped with 6.2L V8 engines because they are at risk of premature catastrophic failure. Class action lawsuits are mounting related to those engines and others.
GM was also hit last year with mounting privacy violation lawsuits related to allegations that the automaker gathered and sold private personal information from millions of customers, a practice first exposed by the New York Times. Veteran auto writer Phoebe Wall Howard reported in January that GM has already accumulated $500 million in costs related to investigations and litigation involving the use of its OnStar Smart Driver technology and warned that the company couldn’t even yet estimate the full potential financial impact.
Texas AG Ken Paxton alone is seeking well over $1 billion in damages for GM’s alleged privacy violations impacting Texas GM owners.
Financial Engineering
Barra’s saving grace is GM’s stock price, which has soared since last year’s fourth quarter, despite the derailing of her “zero emissions” promise. In fact, Barra’s assurances that she will again focus on selling the most fuel-inefficient trucks and SUVs are among the reasons Wall Street currently hails her leadership.
Another reason is Barra’s commitment to financial engineering and stock buybacks, which typically boost a company’s stock price. In the past three years alone, GM’s board has authorized some $23 billion in stock buybacks.
According to the website TREFIS, GM’s stock buybacks and dividend payments over the past five years amounted to 39% of its current market value. By contrast, the median for S&P 500 companies is 16.3%. For all Ford CEO Jim Farley’s talk about China’s automakers being an “existential threat” to Detroit, Barra prefers to enrich GM’s shareholders today rather than stretch every dollar on the R&D required to compete tomorrow.
Taking Money Off the Table
Barra sold roughly 40% of her GM holdings last August, unloading about $35.4 million worth of stock and options. GM president Mark Reuss in February sold approximately 480,000 shares, worth about $38.7 million.
In an upcoming post, I will introduce you to some of the directors on GM’s Barra-led board. Suffice to say, they are among the most well-compensated directors in America.
Eat the rich? Not if you are a CEO or a director of a publicly traded company.
Barra enjoys the best of both worlds. In addition to running GM, she moonlights as a director of Disney.