In 2025, the compensation Elon Musk received from Tesla was approximately 2.5 million times higher than the pay of the company’s average employee, according to an AFL-CIO report.
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Musk’s package, valued at $158.3 billion, contributed significantly to widening the pay gap between corporate executives and American workers. The AFL-CIO, the largest labor federation in the United States, found that the gap between executives at the largest companies and their employees widened further in 2025.
Excluding Musk from the calculations, chief executives of S&P 500 companies earned an average of 312 times more than the average employee. A year earlier, in 2024, the ratio was 285 to 1.
In 2025, the average compensation of an S&P 500 CEO, excluding Musk, reached $22.8 million, up from $18.9 million a year earlier. When the Tesla chief’s compensation is included in the calculation, the average pay ratio rises to 5,387 to 1.
The Guardian reports that including Musk’s extraordinary package raises average compensation to $340.1 million.
According to the AFL-CIO, in 2025 alone, Musk earned an amount equal to the average Tesla employee’s salary every few seconds. The report also highlights that most S&P 500 CEOs earned more in a single day than the average American worker’s annual income.
The report presents these findings as evidence of widening income inequality in the United States economy. The cited figures show that workers’ share of U.S. national income has fallen to its lowest level since the period following World War II.
The AFL-CIO’s analysis also includes U.S. President Donald Trump’s income in 2025.
The report’s data show that Trump earned about $2.2 billion, generated mainly from his cryptocurrency holdings. Compared with 2024, this amount represents an increase of nearly 254%.
It would take the average American worker about 43,154 years to accumulate the same amount.
AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Fred Redmond criticized the concentration of wealth on this scale. He argued that the economic policies of the Trump administration and corporate executives have favored the wealthy while harming workers’ interests.
