Jul 2, 2026
Some CEOs are paid to maximize shareholder value. Others choose to signal confidence in their companies by taking little or no salary, relying instead on their equity stakes, and 2025 showcased just how vast those differences can become.
On the high end was Elon Musk, whose compensation from Tesla came to $158 billion, the biggest executive-pay packages for the CEO of a public-company in the past decade. At the other end of the scale was Block's Jack Dorsey, who took home $2.75.
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Not $2.75 million, mind you. Two dollars and 75 cents. And, for Dorsey, that was nearly double what he made when he was running Twitter. In those days, he earned $1.40 per year, one penny for each character in the company's original maximum for Tweets.
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Why 2025 was unlike any other year for CEO pay
Admittedly, Musk definitely skewed the curve in 2025. His compensation package was about 16 times higher than the combined compensation packages of the 391 other CEOs ranked by The Wall Street Journal's annual ranking of CEO compensation packages. Collectively, the also-rans made $9.9 billion in 2025.
The Wall Street Journal found that the median compensation package for an S&P 500 CEO last year was $17.9 million, a new high. On average, just 19% of that amount is paid in cash, including salary and bonuses. The rest is stock or options. (That percentage ignores Musk's all-stock payday.)
That's likely to be little comfort, however, to a company's workforce. The difference between a CEO's pay package and the average worker varies by company and industry. But to put the number into perspective, Kevin Clark, the CEO of auto parts company Aptiv, made around $19 million last year. The median employee salary was $10,162. That makes Clark's compensation 1,894 times higher than the median (and even higher than that for half of the workforce).
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The 10 highest-paid CEOs of 2025
Musk’s compensation package dwarfed everyone else’s in 2025. But even after removing him from the equation, there was another steep drop: Welltower CEO Shankh Mitra earned more than three times as much as the third-highest-paid executive.
Mitra received compensation worth $821 million last year, a 3,965% increase from 2024. Nearly all of it came from stock awards, including a $789 million grant awarded in October. Under the terms of the package, he’ll receive half the shares if he remains with the company through 2031, with the remainder tied to the company’s performance milestones.
Musk dominated the rankings, but he wasn’t alone. More CEOs received compensation packages worth at least $100 million in 2025 than in any year since 2021, according to the Journal’s analysis.
Here’s who made the top 10.
- Elon Musk (Tesla): $158 billion
- Shankh Mitra (Welltower): $821 million
- George Kurtz (Crowdstrike Holdings): $248 million
- Hock Tan (Broadcom): $205 million
- David Zaslav (Warner Bros. Discovery): $165 million
- Stephen Schwarzman (Blackstone): $126 million
- David Solomon (Goldman Sachs): $119 million
- Nikesh Arora (Palo Alto Networks): $100 million
- Jane Fraser (Citigroup): $96 million
- Charles Scharf (Wells Fargo): $95 million
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Chris Morris is a veteran journalist with more than 35 years of experience at many of the internet's biggest news outlets. In addition to his activities as a writer, reporter and editor, Chris is also a frequent panel moderator and speaker at major conferences, including CES and South by Southwest.
