(Bloomberg) -- The fatal shooting of insurance chief Brian Thompson in New York City this week has reverberated across boardrooms and corporate offices around the world.
At Eli Lilly & Co., CEO David Ricks said the drugmaker was doing a “full review of our policy and procedures.”
“It’s sad, because everyone at our company, including myself, wake up everyday trying to help people, but I guess it’s a reality being a spokesperson for a big company, so we’re looking at all that for our whole executive team,” he said in an interview on Thursday.
Ricks said he couldn’t “remember an incident like this with a corporate executive at all,” a harrowing account that “brings in new elements.”
When asked about the UnitedHealthcare CEO’s death and a shooter that still remains at large, McDonald’s Corp. US President Joe Erlinger said it was “absolutely devastating.” He declined to say whether McDonald’s was making any specific changes to its security protocols.
“He’s a high profile executive, he’s also a father, I saw a picture of his wife and two kids,” Erlinger said. “It’s one of those things you know is always a possibility as a very public figure but you just don’t ever have it presented in the way that it was. It’s hard to talk about.”
Ricks and Erlinger are among executives and businesses shaken by the Wednesday killing, in which Thompson was shot on the sidewalk as he approached a midtown Manhattan hotel ahead of UnitedHealth Group’s investor day. Thompson did not have security personnel accompanying him, the New York Police Department has said.
While a security team was stationed inside the New York Hilton Midtown hotel, they weren’t present outside the building, according to a person familiar with the situation. UnitedHealth Group Inc. has declined to comment on its security practices.
No UnitedHealth executive receives benefits specifically related to personal security or protection, according to the firm’s 2024 and 2023 proxy statements. That’s in contrast to companies like Meta Platforms Inc. and Alphabet Inc., which have allocated millions of dollars a year to protect their CEOs.
Median spending by S&P 500 companies that disclosed security prerequisites spending doubled from 2021 to 2023 to nearly $100,000, according to an analysis by Equilar, an executive-compensation data provider. Over the same period, the share of companies that said they provided security for at least one of their top executives rose slightly, from 23.5% to 27.6%, Equilar found.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams has sought to reassure businesses that the city is safe, stressing that the police believed the killing to be a premeditated, targeted attack. He said he was working with the Partnership for New York City, a group of businesses including JPMorgan Chase & Co. and BlackRock Inc. on addressing security concerns.
“The mayor asked me to assure CEOs of our major companies that this was almost definitely a premeditated shooting,” said Kathryn Wylde, who heads the partnership, in an interview on Thursday. “But there are concerns about what level of security Thompson had and what it suggests about whether others should increase security.”
--With assistance from Matthew Boyle.
©2024 Bloomberg L.P.
