Sen. Bernie Sanders took to Twitter on Monday to criticize Disney CEO Bob Iger's salary and suggest that Disney should use the massive box-office haul from its superhero film "Avengers: Endgame" to give its employees raises.
Sanders' tweet comes just a day after Disney revealed that "Endgame" shattered box-office records, taking in $356 million in the U.S. and more than $1.22 billion internationally in just five days in theaters.
"What would be truly heroic is if Disney used its profits from 'Avengers' to pay all of its workers a middle class wage, instead of paying its CEO Bob Iger $65.6 million — over 1,400 times as much as the average worker at Disney makes," Sanders wrote in a tweet Monday.
Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont who is running for the Democratic nomination for president, isn't the first to criticize Iger's massive paycheck.
Last week Disney heiress Abigail Disney, the granddaughter of the company's co-founder, once again publicly took umbrage with Iger's compensation, calling it "insane."
The comment came after a recent Equilar study found Iger's pay was 1,424 times that of the median Disney employee.
In March, Iger agreed to a new compensation contract that cut his maximum potential annual pay by $13.5 million.
However, the year prior he was awarded $65.6 million for his performance with the company, the result of a pay bump for extending his tenure at Disney through 2021 and stock awards in excess of $35 million.
This year, however, the company eliminated a $500,000 boost to his base salary, keeping it at $3 million. It also cut his potential cash bonus from $20 million to $12 million and reduced his long-term incentive pay from $25 million to $20 million, the company said in a securities filing.
