The killing of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO follows years of mounting fear about executive safety


The CEO of UnitedHealthcare was gunned down this morning in Manhattan. Brian Thompson, 50, was accosted outside the Hilton hotel in Midtown, and later pronounced dead at Mount Sinai West hospital.

Police say that the killing was a targeted attack rather than a random act of violence. New York City Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch called the shooting a “premeditated, preplanned, targeted attack.” The shooter was captured on camera, and last seen in Central Park. They have not been apprehended. The motive for the murder is unknown, but Thompson’s wife told NBC News that “there were some people that had been threatening him.”

Thompson was an executive vice president at UnitedHealth Group and CEO of its UnitedHealthcare division, a role he was named to in 2021, while Andrew Witty is CEO of UnitedHealth Group. Thompson’s killing comes as companies have grown increasingly concerned about the security of their top executives, and it could confirm corporate America’s worst fears. More acutely, the targeting of a high-profile executive raises new questions about whether personal security, corporate aircraft travel, and trained defensive drivers should extend to roles beyond the CEO.

“We don’t know the motivation. Certainly, if it’s a personal motivation, that changes the landscape a little bit,” Glen Kucera, the CEO of MSA Security, a consequence threat protection firm, tells Fortune. “If it was motivated by the business that they’re in, the health care business, or anything that could be related, then certainly that’s a wake-up call to a lot of CEOs and executives traveling throughout the country and the world.”

Large companies seem to be increasingly aware of safety risks for their top executives.

In a review of CEO perks between 2020 and 2023, advisory firm ISS-Corporate found that home security perquisites for CEOs of S&P 500 companies rose from 12.6% in 2020, to 15.7% in 2023. And the prevalence of personal and home security perquisites among S&P 500 companies have been on a steady rise since 2018, data from Esgauge shows. In 2018, only 13.2% of CEOs had these benefits, compared with 17.9% in 2024.

However, the trend to boost security is far less pronounced among health care companies. Among Russell 3000 health care companies, personal security costs actually trended downward from 0.8% in 2018, to 0.5% in 2024, Esgauge data reveals. And the median value of security for CEOs in general in 2023 was around $50,000, according to WTW, an insurance broker and risk management company.



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