Elon Musk’s $158 billion Tesla pay was 2.5 million times his workers’ salary last year—it’s ‘unlike anything we have seen before,’ exec pay watch says

Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, has received an astonishing $158.3 billion in compensation last year, making it clear that executive pay has reached unprecedented levels. According to an executive paywatch analysis from the AFL-CIO, a federation of labor unions, Musk's pay was an astounding 2,522,203 times higher than the median Tesla employee's annual salary of $57,243.

In fact, Musk earned the typical Tesla worker's annual pay every 4.23 seconds. Brandon Rees, a lead researcher for executive paywatch at AFL-CIO, stated that Musk's 2025 pay package at Tesla is unlike anything they have seen before. This pay disparity highlights the widening gap between billionaires and regular workers, with Musk's earnings being 14 times higher than all other S&P 500 company CEOs combined.