The looming SpaceX IPO has drawn renewed attention to the astronomical pay that Elon Musk has secured through his companies.
Last year, Tesla shareholders approved a compensation package for Musk that could eventually be worth $1 trillion, if the company reaches certain milestones over the next decade; in 2025, his pay was valued at over $158 billion. Another lavish pay package at SpaceX could reportedly be worth about $760 billion, assuming Musk can achieve some extraordinarily lofty goals.
Musk may be the most extreme example of inflated CEO compensation, but some of his peers are not too far behind.
A new analysis by the Associated Press and Equilar reflects how CEO pay has soared, climbing higher year after year, even as wages have stagnated for the average worker. In 2025, median compensation for CEOs in the S&P 500 reached $17.7 million, an increase of almost 6% year over year. In fact, the five highest-paid CEOs—which, in addition to Musk, include David Zaslav of Warner Bros. Discovery and Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon—were awarded compensation packages that are worth more than $100 million.
Meanwhile, average pay for workers was $89,744 in 2025, up 4.7% from the year prior. Across half of the companies surveyed, it would take the average employee 200 years to earn what their CEO earned in just one year—a notable uptick from 192 years in the 2024 survey.
The largest gaps were usually at companies where the CEO compensation package included significant stock awards or workers had particularly low wages. (Stock awards are typically the largest component of pay packages for CEOs, which means much of their compensation is tied to company performance.)
Over the last three decades, executive compensation has increased at a rapid clip, far outpacing wage growth across the worker class.
According to the Economic Policy Institute, the average CEO earned 60 times the typical worker in 1989; by 2000, that ratio had jumped to 380:1. As of 2024, CEOs are paid 281 times as much as the average worker. Between 1978 and 2024—nearly a half century—wages for the average worker have increased by just 26%. In that same time period, however, CEO pay has spiked by 1,094%.
As Fast Company has reported, there have been growing efforts to curb CEO pay and increase awareness of executive compensation. Since 2018, the Securities and Exchange Commission has required that companies disclose their CEO-to-worker pay ratios. Lawmakers have proposed imposing higher taxes on companies whose pay ratios exceed 50:1. In San Francisco and Portland, Oregon, there are already laws in place intended to cap CEO compensation, by levying taxes on employers if executive pay is more than 100 times that of the average employee.
Still, there is little evidence that these policy changes have made a dent in CEO pay, even if they have put a spotlight on the issue. And while Musk’s compensation packages may be outliers—even among well-heeled CEOs—they do encapsulate how outsized executive pay has been normalized in recent years.
