Even among the nation’s best-paid corporate chiefs, Elon Musk stands alone. His compensation last year was a mind-boggling $132.3 billion. That’s not just 2.5 million times what the typical Tesla employee made; it’s 153 times the compensation of the second-highest paid chief executive.
Dylan Field, who heads Figma, an online design platform, was runner-up to Mr. Musk in the rankings. But in terms of wealth, he was way behind. His pay, $864.4 million, was a mere rounding error for Mr. Musk.
These astonishing figures come from the latest annual survey of the highest-paid chief executives conducted for The New York Times by the research firm Equilar. The study found that seven other chief executives of public companies had paydays last year of at least $100 million, more than ever before.
Median pay for the 100 highest-paid chief executives in publicly traded companies reached $39.4 million — a new peak, and a leap of 35.8 percent in just one year.
As an editor and as a columnist, I’ve been involved in these Equilar surveys since they started in 2007. They have always shown that chief executives in the United States are exceedingly well paid. But lately, the trend is starker.
Right after Mr. Field in the latest rankings was Shankh Mitra of Welltower, a real estate investment trust that focuses on health care, with compensation of $821 million. Welltower shareholders last month disapproved of that pay package in a rare negative vote. One critic called it an “egregiously management-friendly” transfer of wealth from shareholders. But the “say on pay” vote was nonbinding. A vast majority of such measures are approved at public companies every year.
Fair Pay
In 2018, the Securities and Exchange Commission put out standard guidelines requiring publicly traded companies to compare executive compensation with the pay of a median worker, a person right in the middle of the pay distribution. That year, Equilar found that at the 100 companies with the highest-paid executives, the pay ratio was 334 to one. The level bounced around over the next few years, topping out at 348. What we saw last year was an extraordinary leap, all the way to 475.
The expansion of compensation packages is accelerating radically, just in time for Mr. Musk’s next big venture: the initial public offering of his rocket and satellite maker, SpaceX. That company is aiming for a valuation of $1.8 trillion. Mr. Musk owns around 50 percent of the company’s shares. The sky is no longer the limit.
Shareholder Returns
Equilar has computed the median shareholder return for companies with the top-paid chief executives for each year of the survey going back to 2011. The average was 14.6 percent, about half a point better than the S&P 500’s annualized return for that period, including dividends. Investors have benefited and so have workers, if they held shares of top companies in their retirement accounts.
Considering executive pay purely as an employee may give you a different perspective.
Bosses are usually paid more. Most workers are OK with that, within limits. Peter F. Drucker, the economist, management guru and Wall Street Journal columnist, said it felt “about right” when chief executives received up to 10 or 12 times what workers earned. And he said chief executives should voluntarily limit their pay, keeping it no higher than 20 times what the rank-and-file earned. (Disclosure: Here at The New York Times, the pay ratio is 49 to one, the company’s proxy says.)
The typical pay disparity is now more than 20 times the level that Mr. Drucker, who died in 2005, considered the outer limit for public decency. And Mr. Musk’s compensation is so far beyond the old guidelines that it’s hard to comprehend it.
It’s hardly surprising that proposals for wealth taxes have been spreading across the country. For example, the 2026 Billionaire Tax Act on the ballot in California in November calls for a one-time levy of 5 percent on the combined personal and business wealth of billionaires. And in July, New York City will begin phasing in a new tax on luxury second homes, which was enacted at the behest of Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who has vowed to tax the rich.
Up, Up and Away
At the nation’s biggest public corporations, however, most investors have been willing to focus on rising share prices rather than on executive pay packages. Mr. Musk proved that at Tesla.
Before his latest award from the company, the biggest ever recorded by Equilar was also at Tesla. It was granted in 2018 and was valued at the time at $2,284,044,884. Staggering as that sum seemed, it did not come close to the award’s actual value. It was structured so Tesla would have to reach highly ambitious milestones for Mr. Musk to receive any of it. But the company achieved them, and by Tuesday, the 2018 award was worth $127.7 billion, according to Courtney Yu, director of research at Equilar.
Including all the shares that Mr. Musk already owns, his current wealth from Tesla amounts to $301 billion. That total doesn’t include the latest compensation package, which won’t be vested and fully available to him for years but is now already worth roughly $178 billion because of stock appreciation, Mr. Yu said.
In addition, Equilar calculated Mr. Musk’s wealth from SpaceX, based on the valuation that the company was seeking in its I.P.O. Including shares he owns now and those he will receive if he hits all the firm’s ambitious targets, his SpaceX stake is worth as much as $864 billion. Mr. Musk is well on his way to becoming the world’s first trillionaire.
He has fought yearslong battles to hold on to — and expand — his great wealth, and, lately, Mr. Musk has been winning. In 2024, a Delaware Court of Chancery judge ruled that Tesla shareholders had not been properly informed about how much the 2018 pay package was really worth. By now, they presumably know, and in both 2024 and 2025, shareholders granted him enormous awards.
In December, the Delaware Supreme Court restored his rights to the 2018 bonanza and cleared the way for his latest Tesla pay package.
Mr. Musk has fortified himself against further court challenges. In 2021, he moved Tesla’s legal domicile from Delaware to Texas, where the environment for corporations is more favorable. At SpaceX, which he moved to Texas in 2024, Mr. Musk controls about 85 percent of the voting shares. It is likely to be even harder for dissident shareholders to overturn his pay packages or decisions.
Tesla shares have declined this year, but since its I.P.O. in June 2010, it has returned almost 42 percent annualized, or more than 26,000 percent cumulatively, according to FactSet. Mr. Musk has gotten rich, yes. But shareholders have done well, too.
Pushback
There has been some scattered resistance to high executive awards lately.
In addition to the shareholder vote at Welltower, one at Palo Alto Networks failed, too. It was the seventh time shareholders had voted against executive compensation at the company since 2015, according to Bloomberg. That was the most in the S&P 500.
These votes have merely been advisory. Despite them, Nikesh Arora, Palo Alto Networks’ chief executive, last year received an award worth $99.7 million. Since he stepped into the top job, he has racked up $494 million in pay, according to Equilar.
Mr. Arora has been able to point to his company’s superb stock performance. During his tenure, Palo Alto’s stock has returned 30.6 percent, annualized. That’s nearly double the total return for the S&P 500. Even so, the proxy advisory firm Institutional Shareholder Services says his pay is high in comparison with other companies.
Most say-on-pay measures pass overwhelmingly, so failing to receive at least 70 percent of votes is noteworthy. Aside from the two outright negative results, sub-70 percent tallies occurred at 10 companies in the Equilar survey. These included prominent executives, such as Shantanu Narayen of Adobe, Larry Fink of BlackRock, Hock Tan of Broadcom and Jane Fraser of Citigroup. Ms. Fraser was the highest-paid woman in a publicly traded U.S. company last year, according to the survey. She received an award of $95.8 million.
Much of the data in the series of Equilar surveys is available today because of the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010. Its public disclosure requirements, along with say-on-pay votes, were supposed to rein in extravagant rewards for corporate chiefs. For the most part, it hasn’t worked out that way, though 2022 was a notable exception. That year was the worst for inflation in a generation. Most stocks in the market took big hits, and executive pay packages fell 5 percent.
But the stock market has been strong this year, and executive pay is rocketing higher. It’s true that enormous accumulations of wealth are becoming a political issue. Nonetheless, as long as a great majority of investors keep prospering, I wouldn’t place big bets against the chief executives.
