Even among the highest-paid corporate bosses in the country, Elon Musk stands alone. His compensation was a staggering $132.3 billion last year. Not only is that 2.5 million times what a typical Tesla employee makes; It’s 153 times the compensation of the second highest paid CEO.
Dylan Field, who runs Figma, an online design platform, came second in the rankings behind Mr. Musk. But in terms of wealth created, he was far behind. For Mr. Musk, his salary, $864.4 million, was merely a rounding error.
These staggering numbers come from research firm Equilar’s most recent annual survey of the highest-paid CEOs, conducted for The New York Times. The study found that seven more CEOs of publicly traded companies had salaries of at least $100 million last year, more than ever before.
The average salary of the 100 highest-paid CEOs of publicly traded companies reached $39.4 million – a new high and a jump of 35.8 percent in just one year.
As an editor and columnist, I have been involved in these Equilar surveys since they began in 2007. They have always shown that CEOs in the United States are extremely well paid. But recently the trend is stronger.
Following right behind Mr. Field in the latest rankings was Shankh Mitra of Welltower, a real estate investment trust focused on healthcare, with compensation of $821 million. Welltower shareholders rejected that compensation package in a rare negative vote last month. One critic called it a “tremendously pro-management” wealth transfer from shareholders. But the vote on “the right to have a say in pay” was non-binding. The vast majority of such measures are approved every year in public companies.
Fair pay
In 2018, the Securities and Exchange Commission released standard guidelines that require publicly traded companies to compare executive compensation with the salary of an average worker, a person in the middle of the salary distribution. This year, Equilar found that at the 100 companies with the highest paid executives, the pay ratio was 334 to one. The value continued to fluctuate over the next few years, peaking at 348. What we saw last year was an extraordinary jump, all the way up to 475.
The expansion of compensation packages is accelerating radically, just in time for Mr. Musk’s next big venture: the initial public offering of his rocket and satellite maker SpaceX. The company is seeking a valuation of $1.8 trillion. Mr. Musk owns around 50 percent of the company’s shares. The sky is no longer the limit.
Shareholder returns
Equilar calculated the median shareholder return for companies with the highest-paid CEOs for each year of the survey since 2011. The average was 14.6 percent, about half a point better than the S&P 500’s annual return for that period, including dividends. Investors and workers have benefited from holding stocks of top companies in their retirement accounts.
Looking at executive compensation as just employees might give you a different perspective.
Bosses are generally better paid. Most employees agree with this to some extent. Peter F. Drucker, the economist, management guru and Wall Street Journal columnist, said it felt “about right” for CEOs to be paid 10 or 12 times what workers earned. And he said CEOs should voluntarily cap their salaries and keep them no higher than 20 times the salaries of rank-and-file people. (Disclosure: Here at The New York Times, the pay ratio is 49 to one, says the company’s proxy.)
Typical wage inequality is now more than twenty times the level that Drucker, who died in 2005, saw as the ultimate limit of public decency. And Mr. Musk’s compensation is so far above the old guidelines that it’s hard to understand.
It’s hardly surprising that wealth tax proposals are spreading across the country. For example, the Billionaire Tax Act 2026, which will be voted on in California in November, imposes a one-time tax of 5 percent on the entire personal and business assets of billionaires. And in July, New York City will begin phasing in a new tax on luxury second homes, enacted at the behest of Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who has vowed to tax the rich.
Up, up and away
But at the country’s largest public companies, most investors were willing to focus on rising stock prices rather than executive pay packages. Mr. Musk proved this at Tesla.
Prior to its most recent award from the company, the largest award ever recorded by Equilar also took place at Tesla. It was granted in 2018 and was valued at $2,284,044,884 at the time. As staggering as this sum seemed, it did not come close to the actual value of the award. It was structured so that Tesla had to hit extremely ambitious milestones for Mr. Musk to get some of it. But the company achieved it, and as of Tuesday, the 2018 award was worth $127.7 billion, according to Courtney Yu, research director at Equilar.
Including all the stocks Mr. Musk already owns, his current Tesla fortune is $301 billion. That sum does not include the latest compensation package, which will take years to vest and become fully available to him, but is now already worth about $178 billion due to stock appreciation, Mr. Yu said.
In addition, Equilar calculated Mr. Musk’s net worth through SpaceX based on the valuation the company sought in its IPO. Including the shares he owns now and the shares he will receive if he achieves all of the company’s ambitious goals, his stake in SpaceX is worth up to $864 billion. Mr Musk is well on his way to becoming the world’s first trillionaire.
He has struggled for years to retain and expand his vast wealth, and lately Mr. Musk has been winning. In 2024, a Delaware Court of Chancery judge ruled that Tesla shareholders had not been properly informed about how much the 2018 pay package was really worth. They probably know by now, and shareholders have given him huge awards in both 2024 and 2025.
In December, the Delaware Supreme Court restored his rights to the 2018 bonanza, clearing the way for his latest Tesla pay package.
Mr Musk has braced himself against further legal challenges. In 2021, he moved Tesla’s legal headquarters from Delaware to Texas, where the environment is more favorable for business. At SpaceX, which he moved to Texas in 2024, Mr. Musk controls about 85 percent of the voting shares. It may be even more difficult for dissident shareholders to overturn his pay packages or decisions.
According to FactSet, Tesla shares have fallen this year but have returned almost 42 percent annually, or more than 26,000 percent cumulatively, since going public in June 2010. Mr. Musk got rich, yes. But the shareholders have also done well.
Pushback
Recently there has been isolated opposition to high awards for executives.
In addition to the shareholder vote at Welltower, one at Palo Alto Networks also failed. It was the seventh time since 2015 that shareholders have voted against pay for the company’s executives, according to Bloomberg. That was the highest value in the S&P 500.
These votes were only advisory in nature. Still, Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora received an award worth $99.7 million last year. He has earned $494 million in salary since taking the top job, according to Equilar.
Mr. Arora was able to point to his company’s excellent stock performance. During his tenure, Palo Alto’s stock returned 30.6 percent annually. That’s nearly double the total return of the S&P 500. Still, proxy advisory firm Institutional Shareholder Services says his salary is high compared to other companies.
Most pay-say measures pass overwhelmingly, so it’s notable that they didn’t receive at least 70 percent of the vote. Aside from the two completely negative results, 10 companies in the Equilar survey had scores below 70 percent. These included prominent executives such as Shantanu Narayen of Adobe, Larry Fink of BlackRock, Hock Tan of Broadcom and Jane Fraser of Citigroup. According to the survey, Ms. Fraser was the highest-paid woman at a publicly traded U.S. company last year. She received an award of $95.8 million.
Because of the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010, much of the Equilar survey data is available today. His disclosure requirements and votes on pay were intended to curb extravagant compensation for company bosses. In most cases it hasn’t worked out that way, although 2022 was a notable exception. This year was the worst inflation year in a generation. Most stocks in the market suffered big losses and executive pay packages fell 5 percent.
But the stock market has been strong this year and executive pay is rising rapidly. It is true that enormous accumulations of wealth are becoming a political issue. Still, I wouldn’t make big bets against CEOs as long as the vast majority of investors continue to do well.