Tesla Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA) CEO Elon Musk‘s 2025 compensation was more than 2.5 million times the median compensation of a Tesla employee amid multi-billion-dollar pay packages, according to a report by the trade union center American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO).
Rising Disparity
In a report published on Thursday, the group outlined that Musk’s 2025 pay package was valued at $158 billion, which was “14 times higher than the total compensation of all other S&P 500 company CEOs combined,” the report said.
Musk’s compensation led to the average CEO-to-worker pay ratio across S&P 500 companies growing to 5,387-to-1 in 2025, while excluding him from the mix led to the ratio surging from 285-to-1 to 312-to-1 last year.
The Tesla and Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (NASDAQ:SPCX) CEO’s “total compensation at Tesla was 2,522,203 times the median Tesla employee’s pay in 2025,” the report said. The $158 billion figure also exceeds “the value of all products sold by Tesla in 2025,” while being “41 times more than Tesla’s net income that year,” the report added.
The report also pointed to President Donald Trump‘s income, which increased 254% YoY in 2025 as Trump received “$2.2 billion in income in 2025.” The report said that the “median U.S. worker would need to work 43,154 years to earn” Trump’s 2025 compensation, with the median U.S. wage being around $50,000.
Elon Musk’s $824 Billion Payday
The report comes as Musk’s compensation has been under discussion, with a clause in the trillion-dollar pay package approved by investors in November last year suggesting that all of the performance-based requirements for Musk could become redundant if the company were to merge with or be acquired by another enterprise.
The stipulated conditions suggest that the award would then be determined by Tesla’s market value just before the merger/acquisition or the deal price. The line has fueled talks of a possible merger with SpaceX.
Price Action: Tesla shares slid 0.08% to $339.69 during overnight trading on Thursday.
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