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Hey Small Biters,
There is executive compensation, there is extravagant executive compensation, and then there is Elon Musk. According to a new AFL-CIO analysis, Musk’s 2025 compensation at Tesla reached an astonishing $158.3 billion, putting his pay at more than 2.5 million times that of the company’s median worker. At that scale, the familiar debate over CEO pay stops looking like a gap and starts looking like two entirely different economic universes.
The comparison becomes even more striking when translated into time. According to the report, Musk received the equivalent of a median Tesla worker’s annual pay every 4.23 seconds. A worker could spend an entire year showing up, meeting deadlines, assembling cars, solving problems and collecting a paycheck. Musk’s compensation package theoretically crossed the same amount before most people could finish reading a sentence.
Musk is obviously an extreme case, and treating his package as representative of every American CEO would distort the picture. Remove him from the calculation, however, and the underlying trend remains difficult to dismiss. The AFL-CIO found that the average CEO-to-worker pay ratio among the largest S&P 500 companies reached 312 to 1 in 2025, up from 285 to 1 the previous year.