- Elon Musk earned 2.5 million times more than a typical Tesla worker’s $57k salary.
- Ford CEO Jim Farley earned a comparatively modest 295 times his workers’ pay.
- Musk took home more than $158 billion in 2025 to Farley’s $27.5 million package.
There’s always a pay gap between what the company’s workers earn and what the boss takes home, and most workers accept that. But at Tesla that difference is so outrageous some of the people building the brand’s cars feel like they’re getting a bum deal.
According to AFL-CIO figures for 2025, Tesla returned a staggering CEO-to-worker pay ratio of 2,522,203 to one, based on median employee compensation of $57,243. To put that another way in case it didn’t upset you enough, the average Tesla worker would need to toil for over 2.5 million years to make the same dough as the man at the top. In a separate AFL-CIO ranking of America’s highest-paid CEOs, Elon Musk’s compensation is listed at $158.36 billion.
Related: Musk’s Tesla Pay Is 5,745 Times Ford’s CEO, But He Didn’t Take A Cent Home
The comparison becomes even wilder when you look down the AFL-CIO’s table of America’s biggest boss-to-worker pay gaps. Liberty Broadband technically sits second with a ratio of 7,623,352 to one, but its reported median employee compensation is just $33, making it a fairly useless real-world comparison.
Opendoor Technologies provides something more meaningful. Its median worker received $97,759, while its CEO-to-worker ratio was 7,581 to one. That’s already an enormous gulf by any normal measure, yet Tesla’s ratio is more than 330 times larger.
And then there are Detroit’s automakers. Ford’s median employee earned $93,397, with CEO Jim Farley’s compensation equivalent to 295 workers. At General Motors, the median was $89,785 and the ratio to chief Mary Barra’s package stood at 333 to one. Neither figure is exactly small, but parked alongside Tesla’s number, they look like rounding errors.
Automaker Pay Versus Worker Pay
There’s an important caveat to these CEO pay figures. Musk didn’t simply receive a $158.3 billion paycheck deposited into his account. The number reflects a huge performance-linked compensation award, so comparing it directly with an employee’s annual wages isn’t perfectly apples-to-apples.
But it’s only going to get bigger if Musk gets his way. If he continues to deliver over the next few years, hitting performance markers laid out under a contract approved by shareholders in 2025, he stands to earn the world’s first trillion dollar CEO payout. Tesla became famous in its early years for its EVs’ abilities to accelerate at an otherworldly pace. Now the CEO’s compensation figures are doing the same thing.
Top 15 CEO Pay Packages
AFL-CIO, Tesla, The White House/Daniel Torok
Eagle-eyed math geniuses note: AFL-CIO says that CEO compensation shown in its highest-paid CEO data may differ from the compensation used in company-reported pay ratios because of differing calculation methodologies.
