RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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America is in the middle of a tech-fueled wealth boom: companies have shattered market-cap records, while soaring stock briefly minted the world’s first trillionaire. Now, some CEOs leading the world’s biggest companies are making money so fast that they can earn their workers’ annual pay in a matter of seconds. Elon Musk earned the typical Tesla worker’s annual pay every 4.23 seconds.
The richest person in the world and CEO of tech and EV giant Tesla received $158.3 billion in compensation last year. His pay was 2,522,203 times higher than the median Tesla’s employee pay of $57,243 annually, according to an executive paywatch analysis from America’s largest federation of labor unions, AFL-CIO.
During a typical 30-minute commute, he’s already banked $24.36 million in compensation.
Brandon Rees, lead researcher for executive paywatch at AFL-CIO, tells Fortune the organization has been tracking CEO pay levels since 1997, and “Elon Musk’s gargantuan 2025 pay package at Tesla is unlike anything we have seen before. ”
“Our economy is increasingly out of balance because billionaires like Elon Musk are taking a greater share of the economic pie while working people are struggling to make ends meet,” he added.
To put the inequality into context, while Musk is earning 2.5 million times more than his workforce, the average S&P CEO earns 312 times their workers.
Fortune reached out to Tesla for comment.
Musk’s 2025 pay was 14 times higher than all other S&P 500 company CEOs combined
Musk’s pay represents the largest disparity among all company CEOs analyzed.
His 2025 total compensation was calculated from the grant-date fair value of restricted Tesla stock awarded to him that same year, which could ultimately be worth up to $1 trillion if the company hits performance requirements that Musk needs to earn them.
It’s an eye-watering compensation package that “broke the CEO pay curve,” the AFL-CIO researcher says.
Most CEOs of S&P 500 companies earned more in one day than the average U.S. worker takes home in one year—but Musk dwarfs the entire collective.
His 2025 Tesla pay package was 14 times higher than the total compensation of all other S&P 500 company CEOs combined, the report found.
Including Musk, S&P 500 leaders made around $340 million last year, a roughly 1,700% increase from 2024; but take him out of the equation, and the average CEO pay at S&P 500 companies increased 21% to $22.8 million last year.
CEOs are outearning workers in less than one day while Americans are falling behind
While Americans are monitoring their grocery budgets and delaying major life purchases, their employers are being awarded record-breaking salaries. It’s fueling a growing wealth divide that is not lost on workers living paycheck-to-paycheck.
Now, calculations are putting the growing disparity between soaring CEO wealth and the modest paychecks of full-time workers into stark perspective.
Former Walmart CEO Doug McMillon enjoyed around $27.5 million in total compensation his final fiscal year before departing the retail giant at the end of January.
That means it took him less than 20 hours to outearn the average U.S. worker, who earned about $62,088 yearly, according to 2025 first quarter wage data from the BLS. It could take decades for Americans to pool up savings for a house, but at that rate, McMillon could snatch one up in just one workweek; after 5.85 days, the ex-chief executive reeled in enough to buy a median U.S. home of in $439,000, according to a CEO salary tool from Resume.ai. And over the span of U.S. workers’ dreaded 30-minute commute to the office, McMillon was already $1,563 richer.
Tim Cook, the CEO of $4.5 trillion tech giant Apple , also takes home a compensation package that can eclipse what the average worker earns in an entire year in just hours. He reaped $74.6 million in 2024, up 18% from $63.2 million the year before.
In only about seven hours , Cook had already out-earned the typical American worker, also according to Resume.ai ’s CEO salary tool. In 2.15 days, he could afford to buy a typical U.S. home.
And America’s poorest aren’t enjoying the spoils of their employers’ success.
The after-tax wages of U.S. workers in the lowest-income group grew just 1.3% year-over-year last July, down from 1.6% in the month before, according to the Bank of America Institute. In that same period, higher-income wages swelled to 3.2%—the third consecutive monthly increase. It marked the widest wealth divide between lower and upper-income households in four years.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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