Whom a CEO knows has a substantial impact on pay. An additional connection to an executive or director outside the firm increases a CEO‟s compensation by over $17,000 on average, and explains about 10% of total pay. An additional premium is associated with “important” members: insiders at other firms, geographically local connections, or those within the same industry. Needy firms – those whose non-CEO executives are poorly connected and those geographically isolated from industry peers pay the highest prices for a CEO‟s rolodex. Pay-for-connectivity is unrelated to several measures of corporate governance, evidence against rent extraction in favor of a market-based explanation for CEO pay. * We have benefited from discussions with Andres Almazan, Aydogan Alti, Shane Corwin, Adolfo de Motta, Charlie Hadlock, Jay Hartzell, Tim Loughran, Mitchell Petersen, Gordon Phillips, Anil Shivdasani, Antoinette Schoar, Paul Schultz, Geoffrey Tate, Sheridan Titman, and David Yermack. We thank seminar participants at the University of Texas (Austin) for helpful comments. We are grateful to the University Development Office at Notre Dame for funding the purchase of the BoardEx database. We wish to thank Jacqueline Higgins and Shoshana Zysberg at Management Diagnostic Limited for assistance with the BoardEx database. Xian Cai provided excellent research assistance. ‡ Contact: Joseph Engelberg, Kenan-Flagler Business School, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, (Email) [email protected], (Tel) 919-962-6889; Pengjie Gao, Mendoza College of Business, University of Notre Dame, (Email) [email protected], (Tel) 574-631-8048; and Christopher Parsons, Kenan-Flagler Business School, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, (Email) [email protected], (Tel) 919-962-4132. Please address all correspondence to Joseph Engelberg.