In an era when online anger and social tensions are increasingly directed at big businesses, Meta last year spent $24.4 million on guards, alarms and other measures to keep company head Mark Zuckerberg and the company’s former chief operating officer safe. Some high-profile CEOs surround themselves with security. The fatal shooting of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson while he walked alone on a New York City sidewalk has put a spotlight on the varied approaches companies take in protecting their leaders against threats, the Associated Press reports. Thompson had no personal security and appeared unaware of the shooter lurking before he was gunned down.
“We are better today at collecting signals. I’m not sure we’re any better at making sense of the signals we collect,” says Fred Burton of Ontic, a provider of threat management software for companies. Some of the biggest U.S. companies, particularly those in the tech sector, spend heavily on personal and residential security for their top executives. Meta, whose businesses include Facebook and Instagram, reported the highest spending on personal security for top executives last year, says the research firm Equilar. Zuckerberg “is synonymous with Meta and, as a result, negative sentiment regarding our company is directly associated with, and often transferred to, Mr. Zuckerberg,” the company said this year. Just over a quarter of the companies in the Fortune 500 reported spending to protect their top executives. Of those that did, the median payment for personal security doubled over the last three years to about $98,000. In many companies, investor meetings like the one UnitedHealthcare’s Thompson was walking to, are viewed as very risky because details on the location and who will be speaking are highly publicized. Still, "there are also company cultures that really frown on that and want their leaders to be accessible to people, accessible to shareholders, employees,” said Dave Komendat, president of a Seattle risk managemenet firm.
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