A Fortune 500 pharmaceutical company raised its drug prices, and then board members and executives received phone calls threatening violence. A health care company’s board meeting was disrupted after board members were targeted in “swatting” attacks that wrongly sent law enforcement officers to their homes.
These incidents happened before the fatal shooting of Brian Thompson, UnitedHealthcare’s chief executive, in Midtown Manhattan on Wednesday. The police had not offered a motive for the shooting as of Thursday night, or said it was related to Mr. Thompson’s work in the insurance industry.
The killing, however, stunned business leaders, some of whom were already concerned about safety. Over the last five years, there has been a sharp rise in targeted attacks, digital and offline, of executives and their families, said Chris Pierson, the chief executive of BlackCloak, a digital executive protection firm. Health care, biomedical and pharmaceutical leaders tend to be targeted more often than executives in other industries, according to the firm’s data.
Digital platforms have made it easier to obtain information about executives’ identities and locations, while social media has fanned the flames of vitriol directed at these corporate leaders.
Businesses have been increasing their spending on protection: The median amount spent on executive security among the S&P 500 companies that disclose that information doubled from 2021 to 2023, according to Equilar, an executive compensation research firm.
Because of how frequently threats circulate online, companies and security firms must spend time and effort sorting threats by the severity of threatened harm, the likelihood of an attack and the capacity of the individual making the threat, Mr. Pierson said.
While some social media users responded to the news of Mr. Thompson’s killing with anger and schadenfreude, posting their frustrations about being denied reimbursement for crucial medical treatments, many corporate leaders shared a sense of fear at seeing a not particularly prominent executive fatally gunned down on a Manhattan street.
“My wife was like, ‘Why would someone kill a C.E.O.?’ I’m like, any C.E.O. has people who don’t like them. C.E.O.s have to let people go. C.E.O.s have people competing with their business,” said Seth Besmertnik, chief executive of a software company whose office is also in Manhattan.
Brad Karp, chairman of the law firm Paul, Weiss, said, “It was chilling and disturbing to see the assassination captured on video, two blocks from my office.”
For some chief executives, the shooting is a wake-up call: Political leaders aren’t the only ones who need to be on high alert about their personal safety. Many are now scrambling to do more.
Leaders at Allied Universal, which provides security services for 80 percent of Fortune 500 companies, said their phones were “ringing off the hook” on Wednesday with potential clients. Allied covers a wide spectrum of services — including stationing guards outside offices, chauffeuring executives, surveilling their homes and tracking their families.
Protecting a chief executive full time costs roughly $250,000 a year, said Glen Kucera, who runs Allied’s enhanced protection services.
This month, dozens of Fortune 1000 chief executives will gather for a summit in Midtown, at the Ziegfeld on 54th Street, steps away from where United Healthcare’s chief executive was shot.
Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, who runs Yale’s Chief Executive Leadership Institute and will convene the summit, received a barrage of phone calls on Wednesday with questions about safety at the event. Mr. Sonnenfeld said city police and private guards would be stationed at the summit, a decision that was made before Wednesday’s shooting, though in the past he has not worried about a security presence at the event, which has been held for more than 30 years.
“From the left and the right we’ve seen the frightening, uncanny conversion of angry and deranged people,” Mr. Sonnenfeld said. “Leaders in the corporate world are convenient targets.”
Ranjay Gulati, a Harvard Business School professor, noted that while people were often frustrated with businesses — take Purdue Pharma and its role in the opioid crisis or BP and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill — it was shocking to see that anger lead to violence.
“There’s a latent undercurrent here of how frustrated people are with the health care industry,” Mr. Gulati said. “I’m not condoning the action in any way, but there’s a lot of soul-searching we have to do about an industry that consumes nearly 20 percent of our G.D.P. and yet our outcomes are not nearly as good as countries that spend half as much.”
The police said bullet casings found at the site of the killing appeared to have the words “deny” and “delay” written on them — terms familiar to people seeking coverage for medical procedures.
Kathryn Wylde, the chief executive of the Partnership for New York City, a nonprofit representing the city’s business community, said Mayor Eric Adams called her early Wednesday and told her that the shooting appeared to have been targeted rather than random, asking her to notify members of the partnership.
Next week, the Partnership for New York City will host the city’s new police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, at its annual meeting. Ms. Wylde said that business leaders had been focused on public safety in the city more broadly, but that the shooting of Mr. Thompson could prompt a deeper conversation about the personal security of chief executives.
“It’s reasonable to think that violent rhetoric can lead to tragic results,” Ms. Wylde said.
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