Elon Musk's 2025 compensation package at Tesla reached a reported value of $158.3 billion, more than 2.5 million times the median pay of a Tesla employee, according to an annual analysis by the AFL-CIO released this week.

The labor federation's Executive Paywatch report calculated the ratio at 2,522,203 to 1. That figure meant Musk's package equaled the median Tesla worker's annual earnings every 4.23 seconds. The median employee compensation used in the calculation was $57,243.

The package, based on the grant-date fair value of restricted stock awards, was 14 times larger than the combined total compensation of all other S&P 500 chief executives, the report said. Including Musk's award, the average S&P 500 CEO compensation rose to $340.1 million in 2025. Excluding it, the average still climbed 21 percent to $22.8 million from $18.9 million the prior year, the highest level since the AFL-CIO began tracking the data in the 1990s.

The average CEO-to-worker pay ratio across S&P 500 companies reached 5,387 to 1 when Musk's package was included. Without it, the ratio stood at 312 to 1, up from 285 to 1 in 2024.

Brandon Rees, lead researcher for the AFL-CIO's Executive Paywatch project, described the scale of the award as unprecedented. "Elon Musk's gargantuan 2025 pay package at Tesla is unlike anything we have seen before," he said. "Our economy is increasingly out of balance because billionaires like Elon Musk........

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