The Wall Street Journal’s annual CEO pay ranking shows that nine-figure pay packages surged in 2025, a year after they appeared to be declining. Elon Musk’s $158 billion compensation from Tesla set a new record and is roughly 16 times the combined value of pay for all 391 other chiefs in the ranking, according to the Journal’s analysis. The deal could ultimately be worth $1 trillion, the Journal reported.
The second-highest-paid CEO was Shankh Mitra of Welltower, a real-estate investment trust focused on senior housing and healthcare, who received $821 million. That ranks among the largest executive pay packages for a public-company CEO over the past decade, according to MyLogIQ data cited by the Journal. Nearly all of Mitra’s compensation — 99% — came in the form of stock grants, including $789 million awarded in October. By year-end, the company said shares underlying the award were valued at just over $1 billion, according to securities filings. Mitra stands to receive about half the shares in 2031 as long as he stays, with the remainder contingent on Welltower’s market value rising 45% and the company’s shares beating multiple stock indexes by a wide enough margin over five years.
Three other Welltower executives also received packages valued at more than $100 million each, making it only the second company in a decade to have four nine-figure executives in a single year, according to MyLogIQ. Welltower said the awards replace bonuses and equity for a decade and are designed to align incentives with shareholders.
Despite the top-line numbers, the Journal found that more than half of the CEOs making over $100 million last year ran companies outside the S&P 500, meaning they are not included in the Journal’s primary ranking. These include Dylan Field of design-software company Figma, at $864 million, and Kaz Nejatian of Opendoor Technologies, the online real-estate platform, at $741 million.
Median pay for S&P 500 CEOs reached nearly $18 million in 2025, a new high, with half receiving raises of 9.8% or more, the Journal’s analysis of MyLogIQ data found. The share of executives making under $10 million continued to shrink.
The Journal also reported that CEO pay often bore little relation to shareholder return. Robinhood Markets, which generated the best shareholder return in the ranking at 204%, valued CEO Vladimir Tenev’s compensation at $3 million for the year. Tenev was able to cash in on a 2019 pay package, bringing the CEO stock valued at $1.1 billion, securities filings show. Tenev and the company agreed to scrap a 2021 pay package originally valued at $796 million, according to Robinhood.
Two of the highest-paid CEOs also ran top-performing companies. Warner Bros. Discovery ranked fourth by performance and reported pay of $165 million for David Zaslav. Broadcom, ranked seventh in performance, said CEO Hock Tan received $205 million. Both men have received nine-figure packages before — $247 million for Zaslav in 2021 and $162 million for Tan in 2023. Broadcom said Tan will not receive further equity through 2030 and can earn the awards only by meeting revenue targets related to artificial intelligence.
MSI previously reported that the median CEO pay at S&P 500 companies had risen to $17.7 million in 2024, an advance that outpaces typical worker wage growth. That analysis found CEO compensation reached roughly 200 times the typical worker’s wage.