Hims & Hers Paid Its CTO $60.9M—More Than 2.5x Its CEO
The CEO title is starting to look like a ceremonial sash. Hims & Hers paid CTO Mo Elshenawy $60.9 million in reported 2025 compensation—more than 2.5 times CEO Andrew Dudum.
The CEO title is starting to look like a ceremonial sash. Hims & Hers paid CTO Mo Elshenawy $60.9 million in reported 2025 compensation—more than 2.5 times CEO Andrew Dudum.
That is not a story about one bloke getting a ridiculous pay packet. It is a warning flare for every founder, investor and operator still running a company as if technology sits in the basement waiting for instructions from “the business”.
It doesn’t anymore. In an AI-shaped economy, technology is the business. And the companies that understand this are changing their org charts, their pay structures and—more importantly—their internal pecking order.
Hims & Hers put a $60.9 million price tag on technical leverage
Hims & Hers brought Mohamed Elshenawy in as chief technology officer on May 5, 2025, after he served as president and CTO at Cruise, General Motors’ self-driving-car business. The company’s reported compensation for Elshenawy in 2025 was $60.9 million.
Andrew Dudum, Hims & Hers’ co-founder and CEO, was reported at roughly $23 million for the same year.
Read that again. The technical boss was reported at more than 2.5 times the founder-CEO.
The gap largely came down to equity. Hims & Hers granted Elshenawy 1,036,339 restricted stock units with a grant-date value of $57.2 million. Its incoming COO, Nader Kabbani, received 216,333 RSUs valued at $13.5 million. Elshenawy’s award was more than four times larger.
The board’s explanation was refreshingly plain: competition for experienced AI talent was intense, and Elshenawy’s circumstances were unusual.
Good. At least they said what everyone else is thinking.
If a person can materially change how you acquire customers, personalise products, manage risk, automate work, improve retention and build a defensible data advantage, they are not an IT cost. They are a profit centre wearing a hoodie—or, in many cases, a decent jacket and no patience for PowerPoint.
Before everyone gets carried away, reported executive compensation is not cash shoved into a suitcase. These are grant-date accounting values, and stock awards only become worth what the market says they are worth when they vest. Fortune reported that none of Elshenawy’s RSUs had vested by the end of 2025; based on Hims & Hers’ share price on the final trading day of that year, the original $57.2 million stock award was worth $33.6 million.
Fine. That still leaves the main point untouched. The company was willing to make an enormous, visible bet that its technical capability mattered more than its traditional operating hierarchy.
CTO pay is not rising because boards have lost their minds
The broader numbers are even more telling.
According to executive-pay data compiled for Fortune by C-suite Comp, median reported compensation for executives with “technology” in their title reached $2.6 million in the latest fiscal year. That is up 45.4% from 2021.
Over the same stretch, median CTO compensation increased by $809,587. Median CEO pay increased by $698,399. The combined median dollar gains for COOs, CFOs and chief information officers were $725,584.
That is a proper reshuffle of the executive league table.
In 2021, the typical CTO earned about $176,000 less than the typical COO. In the most recent year, the typical CTO earned about $275,000 more.
This is not because a CTO has suddenly become more important than a CEO in every business. A company still needs somebody to allocate capital, recruit senior people, set direction, face the board and make the hard calls when the numbers turn ugly.
But the role of CEO is being hollowed out in companies where the chief executive remains a storyteller, relationship manager and approval machine while the technology team decides what can actually be built, shipped, measured and scaled.
A CEO who cannot understand the engine of the business is now dangerously close to being a highly paid passenger.
The old org chart was built for a slower world
For decades, businesses largely followed the same script. Sales generated revenue. Operations delivered the thing. Finance counted the money. Technology kept the email working and stopped the servers catching fire.
That model made sense when software was support infrastructure.
It is nonsense when software determines the customer experience, the unit economics and the speed at which a competitor can eat your lunch.
Look at Hims & Hers. It is not merely selling telehealth consultations and prescriptions. Its opportunity rests on building a consumer-health platform that can use data, software and automation to make care feel personalised at scale. That does not mean technology replaces doctors, clinical oversight or trust. It means the business lives or dies on whether its product and technology layers make the whole system easier, safer and more useful for customers.
That is why hiring someone from Cruise makes sense. Elshenawy was not recruited to maintain a website. He was recruited because running complex, data-heavy systems where decisions must work in the real world is increasingly relevant outside autonomous vehicles.
The best technical executives are now translators between commercial ambition and physical reality. They can tell the CEO which grand plans are nonsense, which are feasible, what will take six weeks versus 18 months, where the data is rubbish, and where a modest technical change can unlock millions.
Every serious company needs that person close to the centre of power.
The overlooked lesson: do not confuse expensive talent with useful talent
Here is the contrarian bit: paying a CTO more than the CEO is not automatically smart. It can be a sign of sharp capital allocation—or a sign that a board has caught AI fever and started throwing equity at anyone who can say “agentic workflow” without blinking.
The answer is not to copy Hims & Hers’ number. Most businesses have no business handing out a $57.2 million equity grant to a technology leader.
The answer is to copy the logic, then apply it brutally.
Ask one question: Can this person create an outcome that changes the economics of the company?
Not “Can they talk intelligently about AI?” Plenty of people can do that now. Not “Have they worked at a fashionable company?” That is often just a very expensive reference check.
Can they shorten time to market? Can they reduce the cost to serve a customer? Can they create an advantage competitors cannot buy next Tuesday? Can they turn your proprietary data into a better product? Can they recruit an exceptional technical bench? Can they kill bad projects before they swallow two years and 40 salaries?
If the answer is yes, pay up. Aggressively, if necessary.
If the answer is no, do not dress up a glorified systems administrator as a strategic executive because your board is nervous about missing the AI boom.
There is another trap here. A superstar CTO cannot repair a company where every product decision needs six committees, legal has an unofficial veto over experimentation, and the CEO treats technology as a service desk.
You can buy the best engine in the world. It will not help if you bolt it into a caravan.
What this means for founders and investors
For founders, this is a reminder that your job is not to be the smartest person in every meeting. Your job is to make sure the people who hold the real leverage have authority, incentives and direct access to the decisions that matter.
If your CTO reports three layers down through a COO, who reports through a chief of staff, you have told the whole company that technology is administration. Do not be surprised when your best technical people leave for businesses where they are treated like builders rather than ticket closers.
For investors, executive pay is becoming a useful clue about what a company genuinely believes. Ignore the earnings-call theatre for a minute. Follow the equity grants, reporting lines and board appointments. They show you where power is moving.
A company claiming AI is central while paying its technology leader like a back-office executive is probably doing a PowerPoint transformation. A company tying serious equity to a technical operator may be building something more real—provided the operator has clear commercial accountability.
And for everyone running a team, the lesson is simpler: pay people according to the value they can create, not the prestige of the title you inherited from an old org chart.
What this means for you
Use this tomorrow.
First, identify the three roles in your business that can most change revenue, margin or speed over the next 24 months. Do not start with titles. Start with leverage.
Second, ask whether those people have decision rights matching their responsibility. If they own the outcome but must beg five other executives for approval, fix that before offering them another bonus.
Third, build compensation around outcomes that matter. Equity should reward durable value creation, not a hiring announcement or a shiny AI prototype nobody uses.
Finally, if you are the CEO, do a brutally honest audit of your own role. Are you making the company faster, clearer and more valuable? Or are the people closest to the product quietly carrying the business while you host meetings about “alignment”?
The era when technology answered to the business is over. The businesses that win will be the ones where the commercial side and the technical side are fused at the top.
Everyone else will keep their old org chart, congratulate themselves on having a digital strategy, and eventually wonder where the margin went.