Good morning!
Shock waves rippled across the business world yesterday after the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, Brian Thompson, was gunned down on the streets of Manhattan.
Thompson was killed outside a Hilton hotel in Midtown in what the New York Police Department described as a “premeditated, preplanned, targeted attack.” The suspected shooter fled the scene, and is still at large.
An ambush like this on a high-level U.S. executive is extremely rare. It also serves as a brutal caution to corporate America, which has already increased spending on executive security over the past few years, and will likely send C-suites and company boards scrambling to create better protections for their most senior leaders.
“We don’t know the motivation. Certainly, if it’s a personal motivation, that changes the landscape a little bit,” Glen Kucera, president of the enhanced protection services division at Allied Universal, a security services company, told Fortune. “If it was motivated by the business that they’re in, the health care business, or anything that could be related, then certainly that’s a wake up call to a lot of CEOs and executives traveling throughout the country and the world.”
Companies have increasingly been spending money on security for their top leaders over the past few years. Home security perquisites for CEOs of S&P 500 companies rose from 12.6% in 2020, to 15.7% in 2023, according to a review of CEO perks from ISS-Corporate, an advisory firm. And while only 13.2% of CEOs had home security benefits in 2018, around 17.9% had them in 2024, according to data from Esgauge.
Some of America’s most prominent CEOs also cost millions of dollars every year for their companies to protect. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai’s personal security costs are around $6.8 million annually. And Meta Platforms spent around $14 million to protect Mark Zuckerberg, according to public documents released last year.
While the world’s biggest companies may have no problem shelling for the security of their top person, however, it's a different scenario for smaller enterprises. The median value of security for CEOs in 2023 was around $50,000, according to WTW, an insurance broker and risk management company. And the health care industry in particular has actually seen a decline in security spending over the past few years. Among Russell 3000 health care companies, personal security costs decreased from 0.8% in 2018 to 0.5% in 2024, Esgauge data shows. There's also the fact that many companies don’t provide security for executives who are not CEOs. Thompson, for instance, was the CEO for UnitedHealthcare, but not of his parent company, UnitedHealth Group.
When it comes to the killing of Brian Thompson, there are still more questions than answers, and updates to the case will probably trickle in for weeks and months to come. But executives around America are likely walking into work today with a new list of security questions they never asked before.
“Nobody ever goes to work expecting this to happen to him, right? So that’s why it’s so important to, you know, be informed. Be aware of your surroundings. Have good security protocol in the event that this does happen,” says Kucera. “You have to be prepared.”
Azure Gilman
azure.gilman@fortune.com
Today's edition was curated by Emma Burleigh.
