California, 27 June

Shankh Mitra, the Indian-origin chief executive of US-based real estate investment trust Welltower, has emerged as the world's second-highest-paid corporate executive, behind only Tesla CEO Elon Musk, according to a Wall Street Journal report on 2025 executive compensation.

Mitra received a compensation package worth $821 million, placing him ahead of several global business leaders in the annual ranking of pay among chief executives of S&P 500 companies. Musk ranked higher with a reported compensation package of $158.4 billion.

Almost all of Mitra's award is performance-linked rather than guaranteed pay. Nearly 99 per cent of his total package came through stock grants instead of cash, according to the Journal. About half of the shares are set to vest in 2031 if Mitra remains with the company, while the rest depend on Welltower increasing its market value by 45 per cent over five years and outperforming several major stock market indexes during that period.

Background

Mitra was born and educated in India. He earned a Bachelor of Engineering degree in Instrumentation and Electronics Engineering from Jadavpur University in Kolkata, before completing an MBA in Applied Value Investing from Columbia Business School in New York. He began his professional career at PricewaterhouseCoopers, where he worked for five years.

He later moved into real estate investing, working as a portfolio manager at Millennium Management before joining Welltower. According to company filings, Mitra joined Welltower in 2016 and rose through several senior roles, including Chief Investment Officer and Vice Chair, before being named CEO.

Mitra is not the only Indian-origin executive on the global list of top earners. Nikesh Arora, CEO of Palo Alto Networks, also placed in the global top 10 with a compensation package of approximately $100 million. Arora was born in India and graduated in Electrical Engineering from Banaras Hindu University before completing postgraduate studies in the United States.