Elon Musk slammed as bombshell report reveals shocking pay gap
You don't become the world's richest man with an 'average' wage, yet the disparity between Elon Musk's compensation and what the average Tesla employee earns has left people shocked, as new reports suggest that he earned over 2.5 million times more last year.
This doesn't even take into account his record-breaking pay package which came into effect this year, as Elon Musk became the first person to reach trillionaire status immediately after the SpaceX IPO before quickly dropping back into the hundreds of billions once more.
Last year was a good year overall for CEOs excluding Musk, with the disparity between leading figures and their companies' average workers growing from 2024 figures, alongside the average amount of money that they were compensated throughout the calendar.
It's a completely different stratosphere when it comes to Musk, however, as the $158 billion he received as compensation throughout 2025 not only looks ridiculous compared to Tesla workers, but dwarfs the total combined earnings of every other S&P 500 company CEO combined, working out to be 14 times that already ridiculous total.
How much more does Musk get paid compared to Tesla workers?
As shared by The Guardian, a new annual report from the AFL-CIO, which is the largest federation of labor unions in the United States, outlines that the average pay ratio between Musk and Tesla workers was 2,552,203:1, making the same figure of 'just' 285:1 for other S&P 500 companies excluding Musk look minuscule in comparison.
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Breaking this down into time-based earnings, Musk eclipsed the median Tesla worker's yearly earnings in just 4.23 seconds, meaning that across an eight-hour work day, he'd earned enough to cover the wages of 6,809 employees for an entire year.
As suggested, where Musk's pay really seems ridiculous is compared not to workers at his own company but his contemporaries in the C-suite of America's biggest businesses.
Excluding Musk's compensation, the average CEO's pay was $22.8 million across 2025 – increasing by $3.9 million from $18.9 million in 2024 – but when taking the Tesla CEO's earnings into account, that average figure increases by nearly 15 times to $340.1 million.
Fred Redmond, AFL-CIO's secretary-treasurer, expressed his outrage at these figures, proclaiming: "This is political grift unlike what we have ever seen in our lifetimes, perhaps ever, but it only tells part of the story of how CEOs and the Trump administration has rigger our economy to enrich themselves at the expense of working people."
Will this get worse by the end of 2026?
While these figures alone are shocking enough, it's likely to look even worse for workers when 2026's figures are compared in a year's time, as Musk has only dramatically increased his earnings compared to last year.
Key to that is the overwhelmingly beneficial pay package that the CEO finally secured from the Tesla board of directors, which amounts to more than $1 trillion if all of the milestones are achieved.
Many of these won't be triggered by the end of 2026 unless something miraculous happens for Tesla, but the ongoing success of the company – especially as it focuses increasingly on robotics and AI tech deployment – suggests that Musk will be rewarded handsomely.
Some might argue that Musk, being the 'driving force' behind Tesla, is entitled to this level of compensation — but the same should be argued for the employees that make Musk's visions come to life, as the disparity between his compensation and their earnings deemed to be unacceptable by many.