C.E.O. pay hits record highs as worker gap widens
Top CEO pay surged to a record $39.4 million, while the typical worker fell further behind. Elon Musk’s huge Tesla package has become the clearest symbol of that divide.
Executive pay is pulling away from the rest of the labor market at a pace that is becoming hard for even Wall Street to ignore. In the latest Equilar and The New York Times survey of the 100 highest-paid U.S. chief executive officers, median pay reached a record $39.4 million in 2025, up 35.8% from a year earlier. The rise underscored how quickly compensation at the top is accelerating even as wage gains for ordinary workers remain far smaller.
The gap is just as stark in broader measures. The Economic Policy Institute says realized compensation for CEOs at the 350 largest publicly traded U.S. firms climbed to nearly $23 million in 2024, while the average CEO-to-worker pay ratio reached 281-to-1, up from 31-to-1 in 1978. The AFL-CIO puts average CEO pay at S&P 500 companies at $18.9 million in 2024, or about 285 times the pay of a typical worker. Together, those figures show a corporate pay structure that has drifted steadily upward for decades while worker pay has not kept pace.
No single executive better captures the scale of the debate than Elon Musk. Tesla disclosed in June 2024 that a Delaware court had voided Musk’s $55 billion compensation package, and shareholders were asked to ratify it at the company’s annual meeting on June 13, 2024. That 2018 package was performance-based, carried no salary or cash bonus, and was tied to Tesla reaching a market value as high as $650 billion over 10 years. In November 2025, Tesla shareholders approved Musk’s new pay plan with more than 75% support, a package described as potentially worth up to $1 trillion over a decade and as the largest corporate pay package in history.
That scale matters far beyond Tesla’s balance sheet. The AFL-CIO argues that Musk’s compensation can encourage other companies to benchmark higher CEO pay against Tesla, helping push executive awards even higher across corporate America. The result is a feedback loop in which boards say they are paying for performance, investors accept increasingly outsized incentives, and the gap between chief executives and the workers who build the businesses keeps widening.
This article was produced by Prism’s automated news system from verified source data, official records, and press releases, then run through automated quality and moderation checks before publishing. The system is built and supervised by the people who set the standards it runs under. Read our full AI policy.
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