As threats against tech leaders escalate, executive protection is fast becoming a standard item in corporate compensation packages
At 3:45 a.m. on a Friday in early April, a man threw a Molotov cocktail at the San Francisco home of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. The homemade bomb bounced off the house and caused no damage. For an industry already grappling with rising threats, it was the latest in a series of wake-up calls.
The incident followed the murder of UnitedHealthcare chief executive Brian Thompson on a Manhattan sidewalk in December 2024 and is part of a broader pattern that has rattled boardrooms across the country.
Companies across the United States are spending more than ever to protect their leaders, with the tech sector among the fastest-growing contributors to a trend that has pushed executive protection from the fringes of corporate compensation into the mainstream of risk management.
“I think more people are taking a look at it than ever before,” said James Hamilton, a former FBI special agent and founder of Hamilton Security Group in South Carolina.
“You look at an Altman situation, where you’ve got a guy trying to firebomb the home. That’s a problem not only for the principal, but for his family.”
The cost of protection
Data from Equilar, a compensation analytics firm, shows just how much has changed. In 2021, just 23.5% of S&P 500 companies offered any form of security perk to their top executives. By 2025, that figure had climbed to 39.7%, with the median value of those packages nearly tripling over the same period, from roughly $44,000 to $136,000.
“It wasn’t until a year and a half ago, when the assassination of the UnitedHealthcare CEO occurred, that we saw the prevalence of the spending go much higher,” said Courtney Yu, Director of Research at Equilar in Redwood City, California. “And we’ve been seeing that trend higher for the last couple of years now.”
The tech sector has been a significant contributor to that climb. Nvidia’s security costs swelled from $690,000 in 2023 to $3.5 million in 2025, according to Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings. Meta spent $22 million protecting Mark Zuckerberg and his family in 2025, more than Google, Apple, Amazon, and Netflix combined. Yu noted that spending tends to correlate with how visible and controversial a CEO is, rather than company size alone.
“For someone like Mark Zuckerberg, who is much more well known than other CEOs, there’s going to be more need for security,” Yu said. “It really just comes down to how contentious the industry might be.”
There’s also a ripple effect. As more executives are surrounded by security details or invest in home protection systems, Yu said, others are taking note.
“When they are looking at their competitors and what they’re doing to compensate their executives and they’re seeing these different perks, they’re definitely considering it for themselves as well.”
From reluctance to acceptance
It wasn’t long ago that many tech founders resisted the very idea of personal protection, viewing it as an imposition on their lives and an affront to their self-image as regular people. That resistance is fading fast.
Sid Kosaraju, President of Crisis24, a global executive protection and risk management firm headquartered in Montreal, has watched the shift unfold in real time.
“Whereas security used to be seen as a necessary evil, and in cases even frowned upon by tech executives back in the era of startups, now these same executives are helming multimillion or multibillion-dollar empires,” he said. “There is more proactivity and awareness of the need for holistic security in the tech sector now.”
Hamilton has seen the same change among his own clients. Executives who once balked at basic recommendations, things like safe rooms and armored vehicles, are coming around.
“They’re more apt to say yes to the things that maybe we’ve been recommended for 20 years,” he said. “They might say today, yeah, that’s a good idea. Let me spend the money.”
Security concerns are not limited to physical attacks on executives themselves. At WiseTech Global, a CEO received a hand-written threat of violence against his family after the company announced the elimination of nearly 2,000 jobs due to AI. It’s part of a pattern: as AI emerges as the most cited reason for job cuts across corporate America, the executives associated with those decisions are increasingly finding themselves in the crosshairs.
For Hamilton, the threat isn’t personal. Leaders get targeted not for what they’ve done as individuals, but for what their companies represent.
“Brian Thompson wasn’t killed because he did something to hurt someone’s feelings,” he said. “He was killed because he was the leader of a company that people don’t like, period.”
The social media problem
Security professionals agree that social media has fundamentally changed the speed and nature of threats. What once took weeks or months to escalate can now materialize in days.
“We’ve never had this type of ability to communicate quickly with people who either agree or disagree with us,” Hamilton said. “You get a lot of people in an echo chamber, and the next thing you know, they’re down the road of a criminal act.”
Kosaraju offered a striking illustration of the vulnerability executives face online. Crisis24’s team of ethical hackers was able to compile a complete itinerary of his own daughter’s movements, including her precise location at specific times, using only social media, school planners, and other publicly available information.
“We regularly advise clients on how to use these platforms and be aware of the information they are sharing,” he said.
Hamilton says executives need to take their digital footprint seriously and be proactive about limiting what’s publicly available about them.
“You’ve got to obfuscate as much as you can as far as name, address, where you live,” he said. “Data brokers do not make it easier.”
But he acknowledges there are limits to that approach.
Hamilton says that even when executives take every precaution, the assumption has to be that someone will eventually find out where they live. The focus then shifts to fortifying the home itself.
More than a perk
One of the clearest signals of how the industry is reframing executive protection is the language now being used around it. Companies are increasingly arguing, both internally and in SEC filings, that security spending isn’t a personal benefit but a business necessity.
“It is not a perk,” Kosaraju said. “It is a business continuity safeguard.”
He pointed to a Crisis24 survey of 303 senior US business leaders conducted in April 2026 by The Harris Poll, which found that while every respondent described their organization’s crisis planning as proactive, 93% also admitted their company had missed warning signs of crises or disruptions. More than a quarter of respondents said a single disruption had cost their company $25 million or more.
“Many companies still treat executive protection as a personal benefit rather than a business continuity matter,” Kosaraju said. “That disconnect feels especially striking at a time when physical, medical, and cyber risks are increasingly interconnected.”
A Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance review of CEO and executive compensation practices in the Russell 3000 and S&P 500 found that 25% of S&P 500 CEOs now receive personal and home security benefits, up from 18% the prior year, and that the SEC has made perk disclosure a focal point of its broader review of executive compensation reporting. Companies that fail to properly disclose security arrangements risk enforcement action.
As the gap between executive pay and median worker compensation continues to widen, both Hamilton and Yu expect the trend to deepen. Equilar’s annual CEO pay study found that the median CEO earned 341 times what the median worker at the same company made in 2025, up from 300 times the prior year, a widening gulf that mirrors the record-breaking CEO compensation packages now being reported across US industries.
“The haves and have-nots are getting more and more disparate,” Hamilton said. “The people at the lower end are going to feel pissed off about it. That’s just a fact.”
Kosaraju sees the trend continuing.
“Executive protection should not be seen as an optional extra or a question of optics,” he said. “It is part of how organizations maintain continuity in a more volatile and interconnected risk environment.”
