‘Musk's pay changes the dynamic when other CEO compensation plans come up — boards use it as a reference’
The gap between the pay of corporate America's top executives and the workers who generate their profits widened sharply again in 2025, according to a new report.
S&P 500 CEOs took home an average of $22.8 million — a 21% jump from the previous year — while the typical U.S. worker's pay stayed largely flat, found the AFL-CIO's 2026 Executive Paywatch report.
The ratio of CEO-to-median worker pay rose from 285-to-1 in 2024 to 312-to-1 in 2025, the highest level recorded in the report's three-decade history, excluding one figure that defies easy comparison.
"Executive compensation has reached a new, shameful high," said AFL-CIO secretary-treasurer Fred Redmond in a statement. "Meanwhile, working Americans are struggling to feed their kids and pay their electric bills."
The Musk problem
Elon Musk's 2025 compensation package at Tesla — valued at $158.3 billion (all dollars US) based on the grant-date fair value of restricted stock awarded that year — was so large the AFL-CIO chose to present the data both ways: with and without it.
Including Musk, the average S&P 500 CEO pay exploded to $340.1 million, a figure the report describes as a roughly 1,700% increase from 2024. Musk's compensation alone was 2,522,203 times the median Tesla worker's annual pay — and, the report notes, it was 14 times higher than the combined total compensation of all other S&P 500 CEOs that year.
Musk became the world's first trillionaire in 2025. His pay package has also begun reshaping how corporate boards approach executive compensation broadly.
"Musk's pay changes the dynamic when other CEO compensation plans come up — boards use it as a reference," Redmond told Reuters.
The stock awards that make up Musk's package could ultimately be worth up to $1 trillion if Tesla meets the various performance benchmarks required for him to receive them in full.
S&P 500 CEO pay in 2025
Beyond Musk, the next-highest paid S&P 500 CEO in 2025 was Shankh Mitra of Welltower at $821 million, followed by Kaz Nejatian of Opendoor Technologies at $741 million, according to the report's compensation database.
Niraj Shah of Wayfair ($280 million) and Mahkam Zanganeh of Summit Therapeutics ($246 million) rounded out the top five.
Among more conventional pay packages, Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon received $118.9 million, Microsoft's Satya Nadella took home $96.5 million, and Citigroup's Jane Fraser received $95.8 million.
What the AFL-CIO says should change
The federation argues that excessive CEO pay is not just unfair — it creates incentives for executives to prioritize short-term decisions that maximize their own compensation over the long-term health of their companies.
Citing research from the Economic Policy Institute, the report connects the rise in CEO pay to declining union membership, which it attributes in part to corporate union-busting campaigns and donations to anti-worker political candidates. As one potential remedy, the report proposes requiring companies with a CEO-to-worker pay ratio above 100-to-1 to negotiate a union contract with their employees.
The Executive Paywatch report and database draw on CEO compensation data filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, collected by CSuiteComp.com for more than 3,800 corporations.
