Elon Musk’s Staggering Tesla Package Was 2.5 Million Times the Average Employee’s Pay in 2025

An AFL-CIO report reveals that the compensation Elon Musk received from Tesla in 2025 was around 2.5 million times higher than the pay of the company’s average employee.

Valued at $158.3 billion, Musk’s package significantly widened 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, CEOs of S&P 500 companies earned an average of 312 times more than the average employee. A year earlier, in 2024, the ratio stood at 285 to 1.

Including Musk’s compensation from Tesla pushes the average ratio to 5,387 to 1. The report’s data show that, excluding Musk, the average annual compensation of an S&P 500 CEO reached $22.8 million in 2025, up from $18.9 million a year earlier.

According to The Guardian, when Musk’s extraordinary package is included in the calculation, the average rises to $340.1 million.

The AFL-CIO notes that in 2025, Musk earned an amount equivalent to the average Tesla employee’s pay every few seconds. The report also emphasizes that most S&P 500 CEOs earned more in a single day than the average American worker earns in an entire year.

The report presents these figures as evidence of widening income inequality within the U.S. economy. According to the figures cited, 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 included U.S. President Donald Trump’s income for 2025.

The data presented show that Trump earned around $2.2 billion, mainly thanks to his cryptocurrency holdings. Compared with 2024, this represents an increase of nearly 254%.

It would take the average American worker around 43,154 years to earn an equivalent 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 served the wealthy while harming workers.