Executive pay climbed again in 2025—and the CEO-to-worker gap kept widening

Elon Musk earned more in fiscal year 2025 than any other public company executive—by an almost incomprehensible margin.

His $158.4 billion Tesla stock award, reinstated by the Delaware Supreme Court after years of litigation, placed him atop the annual executive compensation rankings published by C-Suite Comp, whose data covers approximately 3,700 public company chief executives and whose figures reflect fiscal year 2025 for most companies. The award was so large C-Suite Comp removed Musk as a statistical outlier before calculating broader market trends.

Exclude Musk, and median CEO total compensation rose 13% year-over-year to $4.75 million, while the average climbed 26% to $8.96 million. Both figures continue a recovery that began in 2024, after median pay declined in 2022 and 2023. The CEO-to-worker pay gap continued widening: The median pay ratio reached 99-to-1 in 2025, up from 92-to-1 in 2024, 85-to-1 in 2023, and 84-to-1 in 2022. The average pay ratio jumped to 216-to-1 from 175-to-1 the prior year.

Following the SpaceX and Tesla founder, the rankings were........

© Fortune