Musk’s $158.3 billion Tesla pay was the report’s largest outlier
The AFL-CIO, the largest federation of labor unions in the United States, released its executive pay watch report this week. The annual report covers chief executive compensation at S&P 500 companies and compares it with that of the median worker.
The federation reported that, excluding Musk, average CEO compensation at the top S&P 500 companies rose to $22.8 million in 2025, from $18.9 million in 2024. Including Musk, the figure rises to $340.1 million. Excluding Musk, the average CEO-to-worker ratio at top S&P 500 firms was 312-to-1 in 2025, up from 285-to-1 the prior year. Including Musk, the ratio across the index reaches 5,387-to-1, the report found.
“In 2025, Elon Musk received the median Tesla worker’s pay every 4.23 seconds – less time than it takes to read this sentence,” the report stated. “A majority of S&P 500 CEOs made more in one day than the median US worker made in one year.”
The report separately examined President Trump’s 2025 finances. It said Trump reported income of $2.2 billion last year, up 254% from 2024, “largely from his crypto holdings.” At that level of income, the median U.S. worker would require 43,154 years to match what Trump received in 2025, the report stated.
Fred Redmond, the AFL-CIO’s secretary-treasurer, characterized the trends as the product of deliberate policy choices.
“This is political grift unlike what we have ever seen in our lifetimes, perhaps ever, but it only tells part of the story of how CEOs and the Trump administration has rigged our economy to enrich themselves at the expense of working people,” Redmond said.
“Trump’s radical budget bill that Republicans rammed through Congress last year, it made drastic cuts to healthcare, food assistance for children and families in order to give massive tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy,” he said.
The White House responded to the report’s characterization of the president’s finances.
“As President Trump said, he has a lot of assets because he was a massively successful businessman prior to becoming President, which was why he was elected to office in the first place,” a White House spokesperson said in an email. “All of the President’s assets are in held in fully discretionary accounts managed by independent third-party financial institutions. There are no conflicts of interest.”
Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the report.
The AFL-CIO report also cited data on household financial strain as backdrop to its pay-ratio findings. It said 37% of U.S. adults do not have enough money to cover a $400 emergency expense, 33% have no retirement savings, 26% had skipped medical care due to costs, and 23% of renters in the United States had fallen behind on rent over the past year.