Employment in New York’s securities industry reached the highest level in three decades at more than 200,000 workers, reported state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli on Wednesday. And along with sky-high employment, the total estimated 2024 bonus pool among New York Stock Exchange member firms is the largest on record since 1987. But looming uncertainty due to federal policy is muddying the industry outlook for 2025.
Wall Street is back and profits are soaring. And according to a new report, so are bonuses.
New York State Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli reported on Wednesday that Wall Street’s annual wealth infusion for employees—its bonus pool—notched a new record at $47.5 billion in 2024, an increase of 34% over the year prior. The bonus pot hasn’t veered even close to this level since 2021, when the total swelled to $42.7 billion, before tumbling back down to $33.9 billion in 2022.
The comptroller’s office publishes a yearly estimate of bonus payouts for those employed in the securities industry based on personal income tax withholding trends and cash bonuses paid. The average bonus deposit, accounting for those at the entry level all the way up to those with panoramic views in corner offices, was $244,700, DiNapoli found. A year earlier, the average payout was $186,100. The 131 New York Stock Exchange member firms’ profits rose 90% in 2024, the comptroller reported.
“The record high bonus pool reflects Wall Street’s very strong performance in 2024,” DiNapoli said in a statement. “This financial market strength is good news for New York’s economy and our fiscal position, which relies on the tax revenue it generates. However, increasing uncertainty in the economy amid significant federal policy changes may dampen the outlook for parts of the securities industry in 2025.”
Tariffs have claimed a starring role among the many policy changes implemented by the Trump administration, rocking major market averages with uncertainty and volatility. The S&P 500 is down 3% the past month and 1.5% year to date. One of the cascade effects of those federal policy changes—and the presence of Tesla CEO Elon Musk in Washington, D.C.—has resulted in pressure on DiNapoli. As comptroller, DiNapoli oversees the state’s $270 billion retirement fund, which holds a stake in Tesla valued at more than $800 million. A group of 23 Democratic state senators urged the comptroller this month to divest from the Musk-helmed automaker.
According to the two dozen state senators who reached out to DiNapoli, the Tesla stake is the fund’s seventh-largest holding, and it is in jeopardy while Musk is the CEO.
“Musk’s actions leading President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have led to a deterioration of the company’s reputation among its most loyal customers,” states the letter, signed by Senator Patricia Fahy (D.-Albany) and 22 other senators.
Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Meanwhile, the traders, supervisors, analysts, and portfolio managers in New York have a front-row seat to the volatility. The lucrative industry, with an average annual salary of $471,000, helps make up the beating heart of New York City, with 69% of employees residing in one of the five boroughs. More than a quarter of New York City residents who work in securities and finance make more than $250,000 a year. Similarly, more than half of commuters from Westchester County and 41% of commuters from Long Island who work in securities make more than $250,000 a year, according to New York state labor figures.
DiNapoli reported that one in 11 jobs in New York City is somehow linked to the securities industry, and the state derives 19% of its tax collections from it. The 2024 bonus pot will gin up an extra $600 million in income tax this year, and an additional chunk of change valued at $275 million will go into New York City’s coffers in 2024 compared to 2023. Securities industry employment is the highest it’s been in some 30 years with 201,500 workers in contrast to 198,400 the year before. It’s higher than any other state, the comptroller reported.
Still, while New York City boasts the largest number of securities-industry jobs in the U.S., the figure has tumbled consistently since the ’90s, according to labor data. In 1990, a third of all securities jobs were in NYC, compared to 17.4% in 2024. And while New York state added 15,600 securities industry jobs between 2019 and 2023, Texas outpaced it by adding 19,400 jobs of its own. Florida added 13,300 jobs during the same period.
Also worth noting, major financial firms including Goldman Sachs and Citigroup have announced job cuts and restructurings, which could impact headcount in the state’s securities industry.
While Republicans are writing legislation to make good on President Trump’s promise to end taxes on tips, Uber and DoorDash are asking lawmakers to keep their drivers in mind.
The people who hope you don’t puke in the back of their car at 3am (or bring you that $24 burrito when it’s drizzling) are most frequently classified as independent contractors and receive a 1099, which means they wouldn’t be eligible for that tax break under the proposed bill, unlike the many casino and restaurant employees who get W-2s:
A report from Gridwise said food delivery drivers make 53.4% of their earnings from tips, while ride-hailing drivers get ~10% of their income from gratuities.
Restaurant workers collect 23% of their income from tips, according to data from Square, while casino dealers take home ~60% of their pay from tips, according to Payscale.
Critics have pointed out that low-income workers who don’t receive tips are missing out on needed help, although Trump has made other promises, including no tax on overtime, that are “in play” for this tax bill, per the WSJ.
To make up for the lost tax revenue, Axios reports the Trump administration is considering raising the tax rates on the biggest earners in the US from 37% to pre-2018 levels of 39.6% while lowering the threshold from the current benchmarks of $609,351 for an individual and $731,201 for a couple.—DL
When Katherine Stueland was 11 years old, she went to a reunion for her mother’s branch of the family tree and learned that multiple cousins had cystic fibrosis.
Stueland didn’t know what it meant for her or her immediate family. So she hit the books.
“There was one written by sportswriter Frank DeFord”—Alex: The Life of a Child—”about his daughter having cystic fibrosis,” she tells Fortune. “I devoured it and decided I was going to change the world. I ended up raising $1,500 for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation.”
That moment didn’t exactly set Stueland on a path to become a physician or a lab rat. She went on to earn a college degree in, yes, science, but also English literature, and build her professional career working in communications for health-adjacent companies.
But her career arc slowly bent back toward that childhood revelation. Today, Stueland is the CEO of GeneDx, a publicly traded genetic testing company with $302 million in 2024 revenue and a $2.6 billion market cap, headquartered in Stamford, Conn.
“Today I spend most of my time working with rare disease patient advocates,” she says. “It’s kind of full circle in a sense. I did not intend for it to be that way at all.”
From pharma to biotech
Stueland spent the first part of her career working on pharmaceutical concerns. She worked on the first protease inhibitor for HIV/AIDS and the first cancer immunotherapy approved by the Federal Drug Administration. She worked on Lexapro and the effort to destigmatize depression and anxiety. She worked on Namenda, used to treat the severe dementia that comes with Alzheimer’s disease.
But it took a 2013 divorce to disrupt her pattern, pull her out of the Midwestern corporate pharma world, and thrust her into a West Coast biotech scene that eschewed offices, emphasized teams, and encouraged taking big risks.
“The corporate environment gave me the stability to survive,” she says. “As I got my confidence up, and talking to these companies and seeing how scrappy they were, that felt very much like home to me. Migration was about taking a risk on myself and feeling comfortable taking risks on other people, too.”
It was also a landmark year for the business of genetics. In 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics that isolated human genes couldn’t be patented.
Stueland began working for Invitae, now owned by Labcorp, which had spun out of Genomic Health in part with the hope that the courts would rule as they did.
“Another taking-a-big-risk moment,” she says. “The company placed a big bet on that.”
The impact of accessibility
The nascent genetic testing industry took off like a rocket. More and different kinds of people had testing done. Costs plummeted—what was once $3,500 to sequence a single gene became less than that to do a genome that contains 20,000 genes.
And with wider testing, more patterns about genetic conditions were observed. For breast cancer, for example, the same share of patients inside and outside recommended screening guidelines were found to be at risk, widening the necessary aperture.
“We’re diagnosing more women with breast cancer, earlier, because we’re screening more,” she says, “but the morbidity rate is going down because we’re finding them earlier and able to intervene.”
Stueland’s career was unquestionably soaring along with the genetic testing boom. But it wasn’t until 2021 that she entertained the idea of taking a company’s top job.
‘I was totally surprised’
“In the middle of the pandemic I got a call about my interest in taking a CEO job,” she recalls. “I felt like I had a lot of clarity before that moment that I had zero interest. I was a really good right-hand person. But ‘yes’ came out of my mouth. I was totally surprised.”
That call came from a rival genetic testing firm: GeneDx. She was familiar with the organization and its technology because she had competed against it for years. But Stueland was an unorthodox candidate—a veteran of the category, yes, but one without an MBA, MD, or PhD.
“I wanted to create a culture where people could take risks on themselves and create amazing career journeys—where people could take risks they couldn’t at other companies,” she says. “This team is scrappy with people with many different backgrounds coming together with a common purpose.”
She also wanted to give a “smart, cerebral, bespoke, academic” company burning tens of millions of dollars a quarter the commercial muscle it needed to function in the public markets.
“It was a huge transformation, and I underestimated that,” she says. “It took an immense amount of partnership across the company. I knew that culture was going to be a huge part of what made or broke us, without a doubt.”
Accomplishing that meant embracing the dynamism of an entrepreneurial approach—faster, decisive, more growth-oriented—that first attracted Stueland from more the conventional environments she occupied earlier in her career.
“You know what song you need to play, what musicians you need to bring, what notes you need to play [for a given audience],” she says. “I consider the meetings in which I don’t speak as much as they do to be the best meetings I’m in.”
After years of recalibration—and a hard slide from its frothy 2021 market peak—GeneDx is once again on the upswing. The company’s shares are selling at 10X what they were a year ago. It’s on track to profitability this year. It stands to benefit from recent FDA guidance on the use of AI in medical devices. And it’s chipping away at a rare disease economic burden that its CEO estimates to be $1 trillion.
That’s all good news for GeneDx’s top executive. But on a personal level, Stueland is grateful that her career has come back to that family reunion all those years ago.
“There’s been this wonderful consistent thread of working with people who want to improve people’s lives, as pithy as that sounds,” she says. “A lot of people come to this industry from personal experience or the experience of a loved one.”
Entertainment8 years ago