America’s biggest companies are spending more than ever before to try and keep their chief executives safe.
According to the latest stock market filings from the likes of Tesla, BlackRock and Goldman Sachs, the amount of money spent protecting their wealthiest and most senior staff has skyrocketed.
In the aftermath of the December 2024 murder of Brian Thompson, the boss of health insurance company UnitedHealthcare, a new paranoia has set in that has changed the way firms assess potential threats.
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Proxy statements filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) show that Goldman Sachs outlaid $95,569 on protection arrangements for its CEO David Solomon last year, an increase of almost 20 per cent compared to 2024, while BlackRock increased its personal security spending for chief executive Larry Fink by more than 200 per cent to almost $800,000.
Electric car company Tesla, meanwhile, outlaid an eyewatering $4.8m on security for its founder and CEO, Elon Musk, almost double that of 2024.
BlackRock’s filing read: ‘For the personal security of Mr Fink, the value reported for 2025 also includes $764,385 for expenses incurred by the company to provide personal and residential security. This includes the provision of armed security personnel assigned to protect Mr Fink as well as armed security personnel assigned to provide security at his residences.’
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Stock market rules in the US dictate that listed companies must declare spending on protection for senior executives, while firms in Europe and Asia have no such obligation.
But security experts, who count a fast growing number of HNW individuals among their roster of clients, say the jump in US expenditure is not an isolated event, with the rise detailed within the SEC filings being replicated across the corporate world and beyond.
‘The American figures are only visible because SEC rules force such disclosure,’ says Philip Grindell, founder and CEO of threat advisory practice Defuse Global. ‘UK companies reveal far less but the same increase in security spending is happening out of sight. And in the private wealth market, where families have no filings to publish at all, the picture is moving faster still.’
Grindell says he has observed a significant increase in spending on protection by the very wealthy and, although there is no explicit available data, what he can ‘speak to’ is how conversations have changed.
‘Five years ago, families approached us about residential security or protection while travelling abroad. Today they want to know what information about them is sitting in the public domain, whether anyone has developed a fixation on them or their children, and whether a grievance held by a former employee, business partner or member of household staff is quietly building into something worse.’
Boards respond to events rather than evidence, he adds, with Thompson’s murder becoming the incident that ‘finally moved’ executive protection from a discretionary cost to a board-level duty.
‘I watched the same thing happen in UK politics,’ says Grindell. ‘The hostility towards MPs had been building for years, but it took the murder of Jo Cox in 2016 before anyone funded a proper threat assessment. I was brought in to build that team and our work went on to prevent a planned terrorist attack against another MP.’
As well as the fatal shooting of Thompson outside Manhattan’s New York Hilton Midtown, where he was due to speak at a conference, a lone gunman six months later killed four people in an office block on Park Avenue, home to the global headquarters of Blackstone. Additionally, in April this year 20-year-old Daniel Moreno-Gama was arrested after allegedly throwing a Molotov Cocktail at the San Francisco home of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Moreno-Gama was arrested less than two hours later while allegedly attempting to enter the OpenAI’s offices with a jug of kerosene, a lighter and an anti-AI manifesto.
Grindell says that in almost every serious case he has worked on the warning signs were there long before the incident took place.
‘Organisations and families that wait for something to happen before acting have usually missed every opportunity that mattered,’ he says. ‘A chief executive at least has a corporation watching their back, but a private family has to make that judgement alone and many leave it too late.’
Glen Kucera, president at Allied Universal Enhanced Protection Services, which owns private security company G4S, agrees: ‘Violence towards [the wealthy] and company leaders is clearly on the rise. Societal polarisation and economic instability are contributing to more unpredictable — and even indiscriminate — violence,’ he says.
The security experts suggest a polarisation within politics and heightened international tensions as a result of the war in Iran, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine are contributing to a spillover of violence at a lower level.
The two recent assassination attempts on US president Donald Trump, the latest of which took place at the annual White House correspondents’ dinner in April, illustrate the bubbling over of anger, they say.
Asked if the spike in security spending surprises him, David Allison, founder and CEO of Octaga Security Services, says: ‘Not one bit. The world has sadly become more unstable and what were always deemed as safe places in Europe and the UK especially, have become areas of unrest and heightened crime spots.
‘The world has become increasingly volatile, with political, economic and technological shifts occurring at unprecedented speed, making existing assumptions harder to rely on.’
Grindell adds in closing: ‘Many of the families we work with can’t point to one individual they fear. They simply carry a low-level of unease into every restaurant, school run and holiday. A client who feels unsafe is unsafe, whatever hardware sits at the gate.’
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