Source: Fortune
Summary
Elon Musk’s $158.4 billion Tesla stock award made him the highest-paid public company executive in fiscal year 2025, according to C-Suite Comp’s annual rankings. Excluding Musk, median CEO total compensation rose 13% to $4.75 million, while the average climbed 26% to $8.96 million. The CEO-to-worker pay gap continued to widen, reaching 99-to-1 in 2025. Technology was the top-paying sector for CEOs, led by Figma’s Dylan Field, who took home $864.4 million. The pay ratio figures show the gap between CEOs and their workforces has widened every year since 2022.
Our Reading
The numbers tell one story.
Elon Musk’s $158.4 billion stock award dwarfs the compensation of other top executives, including Figma’s Dylan Field and Welltower’s Shankh Mitra. The widening CEO-to-worker pay gap has drawn scrutiny from investors and shareholder advocates, with Warren Buffett warning that executives are increasingly driven by what peers are earning. The trend has been fueled by equity-heavy packages and option awards, which have become increasingly common in the technology sector. The gap between CEOs and their workforces has widened every year since 2022, with Tesla posting the highest ratio in the dataset at 2,522,203-to-1.
What happens when the pay gap becomes a chasm?
Author: Evan Null
