CEO pay is up, up and away, thanks to Elon Musk, who became the world’s first trillionaire this year when his company SpaceX had its initial public offering of stock on the North American Stock Exchange. And that’s after Musk’s $158 billion pay package last year at Tesla broke the CEO pay curve. It was 14 times higher than the total compensation of all other S&P 500 company CEOs combined.
That’s one highlight from the national AFL-CIO’s annual Executive Paywatch report.
Including Musk, S&P 500 CEOs received $340.1 million on average in 2025, about a 1,700% increase over the previous year. Excluding Musk’s Tesla pay package, the average CEO pay at S&P 500 companies increased 21%, from $18.9 million in 2024 to $22.8 million in 2025.
Musk’s total compensation at Tesla was 2,522,203 times the median Tesla employee’s pay in 2025.2 Excluding Musk, the average pay ratio of S&P 500 companies increased from 285-to-1 in 2024 to 312-to-1 in 2025.
Check out the report at https://aflcio.org/paywatch
