Busting CEO Pay Curve in 2025, Musk Made Annual Salary of Average Tesla Worker Every 4.2 Seconds

"Failed trillionaire" Elon Musk's $158 billion pay package at Tesla was so high that it "broke the CEO pay curve," as the nation's largest federation of labor unions underscored on Thursday in its annual report about chief executive pay.

"Including Musk, S&P 500 CEOs received $340.1 million on average in 2025, about a 1,700% increase over the previous year," explains the AFL-CIO's latest "Executive Paywatch" report. "Excluding Musk's Tesla pay package, the average CEO pay at S&P 500 companies increased 21%, from $18.9 million in 2024 to $22.8 million in 2025."

"The average CEO-to-worker pay ratio across S&P 500 Index companies was 5,387-to-1 in 2025. Musk's total compensation at Tesla was 2,522,203 times the median Tesla employee's pay in 2025," the publication continues. "Excluding Musk, the average pay ratio of S&P 500 companies increased from 285-to-1 in 2024 to 312-to-1 in 2025."

Musk became the world's first trillionaire in June, after another company for which he serves as CEO, SpaceX, went public—but as of Thursday afternoon, his net worth was estimated at around $880 billion, according to the Bloomberg and Forbes billionaire lists.

The AFL-CIO report spotlights the wealth of the world's richest man, noting that last year "Elon Musk received the median Tesla worker's pay every 4.23 seconds—less time than it takes to read this sentence," but it also stresses that he's far from alone in making exorbitant amounts of money compared with the wages of workers at the companies he leads.

"As shown in our latest Paywatch report, executive compensation has reached a new, shameful high," said AFL-CIO secretary-treasurer Fred Redmond in a statement. The report points out that "a majority of S&P 500 CEOs made more in one day than the median US worker made in one year."

"Excessive CEO compensation contributes to growing economic inequality," the document says. "It creates the risk that CEOs will make short-term decisions to maximize their pay, even if it hurts the company's long-term health. And it's simply unfair to the workers whose labor generates the profit these CEOs capitalize on."

AFL-CIO found that the biggest ratio for executive v. worker pay was in manufacturing: Average executive compensation—which often includes not only a salary but also a bonus, stock, a retirement plan, and more—topped $696 million a year, while the typical worker made just over $93,000.

By sector, the second-highest was in arts, entertainment, and recreation, where executives were paid over $24 million while the median worker got just $24,850 annually. In educational services, average executive pay was around $50 million while workers were paid under $58,000.

The report emphasizes that like the CEOs, "2025 also was a very good year" for President Donald Trump, who returned to office in January and, according to recent federal disclosure forms, pocketed at least $2.2 billion last year—which, as the AFL-CIO found, was "a nearly 254% increase from what he received in 2024."

"Trump's 2025 receipts included $1.4 billion from the sale of $TRUMP memecoins and World Liberty Financial, his family's cryptocurrency business," the report says. "The median US worker would need to work 43,154 years to earn what Trump received in 2025."

While gutting the federal government with help from Musk, Trump last year signed the GOP's so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act, cutting programs for working people to give billionaires more tax breaks—and Wednesday's release of the latest inflation figures highlighted how Americans continue to struggle with the cost of gasoline, groceries, healthcare, housing, and more.

Redmond said that "Elon Musk became the world's first trillionaire. Donald Trump raked in over $2 billion since the 2024 election. Meanwhile, working Americans are struggling to feed their kids and pay their electric bills. But there's a better economy we can build for working people."

"That's why the labor movement will continue to fight for every worker to have a union contract that begins to level the playing field and ensures they take home the share of the profit they create," he added. "And it's why we are spending every day until November organizing and mobilizing 16 million union voters to elect pro-worker politicians who will work for us, not wealthy CEOs."