DoorDash: From Case Study To Cautionary Tale

Tony Xu, co-founder and CEO of DoorDash, founded the company in 2013 with Stanford GSB classmate Evan Moore, as well as Andy Fang and Stanley Tang, who were studying in the computer science department at Stanford University. Xu’s reported CEO salary is modest by the standards of his peers, according to a new report on excessive executive pay

In 2013, a Stanford Graduate School of Business student named Tony Xu enrolled in a class called Startup Garage, which requires teams to interview dozens of real business owners before writing a line of code. 

Xu’s team talked to 60 of them. One ran a macaroon shop and mentioned that customers kept asking for delivery. Xu and two Stanford undergrads, Stanley Tang and Andy Fang, pivoted the idea to restaurants, and Palo Alto Delivery was born. It became DoorDash – the subject of its own Stanford GSB case study, “Building Density in the Last Mile,” and, last week, an unflattering footnote in a very different kind of business school reading.

The Institute for Policy Studies released the 32nd edition of its annual Executive Excess report late last month, and DoorDash is one of its marquee examples. The report notes that Xu and his co-founders became billionaires when the company went public, even while the 9 million “Dashers” who actually deliver the food are excluded from the median-pay math because they’re classified as independent contractors – earning an average of roughly $12.43 an hour, or about $2,222 a year in a workforce where most work only a handful of hours weekly. Xu’s own reported pay is modest by CEO standards: $431,864, just 12 times DoorDash’s median. 

His co-founder and COO, Prabir Adarkar, took home $15.7 million, 432 times that median.

THE NUMBERS BEHIND THE ‘LOW-WAGE 100’

DoorDash’s wealth sits almost entirely in founder equity – created, in no small part, inside a Stanford MBA classroom. But the San Francisco Bay Area unicorn isn’t an outlier in the report for having an MBA at the top. It’s the norm.

Executive Excess 2026 examines the 100 S&P 500 companies with the lowest median worker pay – the “Low-Wage 100” – and finds average CEO compensation across the group hit $17.5 million in 2025 against a median worker paycheck of $36,571, a ratio of 614-to-1, up from 574-to-1 a year earlier. Seventeen companies posted ratios north of 1,000-to-1.

CEO pay across the cohort climbed 41.4% from 2019 to 2025, roughly double the 20.7% gain median workers saw, while those same companies spent $718 billion buying back their own stock rather than raising wages – $108.6 billion of it in 2025 alone. The report ties that math to at least 36 billionaires, eight of them minted by Walmart.

THE MBA ROSTER

Run the report’s named executives through a business-school lens and a pattern emerges fast. Andy Jassy, who inherited Amazon’s CEO chair from founder Jeff Bezos, is a Harvard College and Harvard Business School grad. Amazon’s median worker pay is listed at $40,206, and the report flags the company as second only to Walmart in employees relying on public assistance.

Walmart’s own Doug McMillon earned his MBA at the University of Tulsa in 1991 while working nights as an assistant store manager – a distinctly non-elite MBA story that still landed him $29.2 million in 2025 pay, 958 times Walmart’s $30,520 median. 

Home Depot’s Ted Decker carries a Carnegie Mellon MBA (Class of 1993) and took home $16.2 million, 427 times his company’s median. Target’s Brian Cornell, whose graduate business education traces to UCLA Anderson, earned $21.8 million against a $27,506 median worker paycheck – a 794-to-1 spread. 

Not every name on the list carries the credential: IBM’s Arvind Krishna holds a Ph.D. in electrical engineering, not an MBA, and still pulled the report’s largest single package at $38 million, 765 times IBM’s median.

WHAT COMES NEXT

For MBA students, Xu’s case at DoorDash cuts both ways: It’s the Stanford GSB success story business schools love to tell, but it’s also a data point in a report about exactly what that kind of success costs the people who aren’t in the classroom.

And the Institute for Policy Studies isn’t just cataloguing the gap – it’s pushing specific fixes: tax penalties on companies with CEO-to-worker ratios above 50-to-1 (already running in San Francisco and Portland, Oregon), a hike in the federal stock buyback excise tax from 1% to 4%, a ban on executives selling shares within a year of a buyback announcement, and conditioning federal contracts on companies keeping pay ratios under 100-to-1.

Somewhere at Stanford, there’s a syllabus that needs an addendum. 

Read the full report: Executive Excess 2026 – Institute for Policy Studies.

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