A new report shows Elon Musk as the highest-compensated CEO, making as much money as 2,522,203 average Tesla workers in 2025. This happened as the Tesla CEO presided over a significant drop in profits which he was largely personally responsible for.
The report is the AFL-CIO’s annual executive paywatch. The AFL-CIO is the largest labor union federation in the US, and compiles a report on CEO pay, tracking the average difference between CEO pay and worker pay at S&P 500 companies in the US.
The number usually stands somewhere in the ~300:1 range, meaning the average CEO is paid 300 times more than the average worker at their own company. This difference is significantly more unequal than CEO pay in other countries, and significantly more unequal than CEO pay used to be decades ago in the US.
But this year, there’s an anomaly: Elon Musk.
Last year, Tesla reported that Musk made $158 billion in compensation as Tesla CEO. That’s more money than Tesla’s total revenue in 2025 ($94B) – a year when revenue was down 3% from the year earlier, marking Tesla’s first year-over-year revenue decline ever.
Musk’s single-year 2025 compensation was also higher than the company’s total profits over its entire history. One single employee, making several times more money in one year than the company’s combined historical profits since its inception.
Thanks to Elon Musk’s ridiculous pay packages (yes, plural), which broke records as the largest pay packages of any CEO in history several times over, Musk brought up the average in this year’s numbers.
Last year, the average pay ratio excluding Musk was 285:1. This year, the average pay ratio including Musk is 5,387:1 (the average pay ratio without Musk is 312:1 – still a problem, and an increasing one). Musk’s 2,522,203:1 personal number is an outlier, bringing up the average across the 500 companies, so the report had to exclude him to get a better idea of the average.
Given that Tesla only has ~135k employees, this high ratio means Musk made more money than the entire Tesla payroll, several times over, suggesting that one year of his distracted tweeting is worth more to the company than ~18 years worth of the labor of all Tesla employees combined.
It’s a strange value calculation, though, given that Musk has demonstrably led to lower revenue and profits for the company through his own individual effort, objectively doing far more harm to the company than any other employee has.
Paid 2.5 million times more for being the worst employee
Musk spent $288 million of his own money on an anti-EV campaign which had the effect of defeating EV incentives in the US. This cost Tesla $1.4 billion in one quarter alone (and continued misses since)… but it might have gotten Musk out of a personal SEC investigation, showing that he is more interested in his own personal fortunes than that of the employees he’s channeling compensation away from.
But that’s not all – Musk has also caused a collapse of Tesla’s reputation, due to his incessant white supremacist rambling on twitter. This has involved support for German neo-Nazis, agreeing with a defense of Hitler’s actions in the Holocaust, encouraging race riots in several countries, and other white supremacist statements.
But his politics haven’t just been limited to public advocacy, he also managed to convince the US to stop a cheap, effective aid program, with his intervention likely resulting in over 14 million deaths.
His behavior has driven protests against the company, embarrassed owners and pushed many customers away. Tesla sales had been consistently going up since the company’s inception, but Musk turned that around.
He did have one moment of lucidity about how poor his political meddling has been for his company, but since then, he’s continued the same behavior. It seems like his admission that he “got carried away [with politics]” was not much more than a fleeting attempt to do a little PR, but it turns out he just can’t hide his racism.
Beyond the long-term mark on public perception Musk has left on the company, his business decisions have been disruptive to say the least.
He’s had puerile outbursts like firing the highest-performing team within Tesla due to a personal conflict, which led to total chaos in the company’s charging rollout.
He’s pushed through bad vanity products like the Cybertruck (which is doing worse than the Edsel, perhaps the auto industry’s most famous flop), de-emphasized the thing Tesla does best (selling cars), and doubled down on areas that are outside of Tesla’s expertise – AI, robots, cars without steering wheels and so on.
He’s consistently overpromised and underdelivered on full self-driving, with his overpromises leading to tens of billions of dollars in potential legal issues for the company.
And he’s done all of this while focusing most of his time on other endeavors – like twitter, the AI deepfake porn company which he’s so addicted to posting about race on (or pretending he’s good at videogames on) that he bought it, lost tens of billions of dollars on the deal, then merged it with SpaceX and did a public offering so he could offload that debt onto unsuspecting members of the IPO-buying public (including your retirement fund) by promising physically-impossible space data centers.
He hasn’t just spent his focus on his other companies, he also channeled Tesla resources to benefit those companies, for example by sending a coveted GPU allocation from public Tesla to private xAI, and poaching talent from Tesla for his other endeavors. He’s even undoing Tesla’s climate work by not just spreading climate misinformation but building fossil fuel-powered data centers when he has a perfectly-good solar company that he seems to have forgotten about.
These distractions, reputational damage, lack of focus, overspending, and negative political engagement have turned Tesla profits, which had been growing, down to a sliver of their previous numbers. In 2025, the year covered by the report, Tesla GAAP profits were down 61% from 2024. Tesla has had to resort to various financial shenanigans to eke out profits so far in 2026, though those profits have been low.
For all of this sabotage of the public company he leads, Musk was rewarded with compensation on par with not just years, but decades of the total compensation of all other Tesla employees combined. Tesla made less money, while Elon Musk made more.
It would be hard to find a single employee that has done more damage to the company (or any company, honestly) than all of the above. And yet that employee has been not only retained, but given much more compensation than every other employee combined.
To examine the report, head on over to AFL-CIO’s website. And if you can think of any employee that has been worse for any company than Elon Musk, let us know in the comments.
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