Elon Musk earned more in fiscal year 2025 than any other public company executive—by an almost incomprehensible margin.
His $158.4 billion Tesla stock award, reinstated by the Delaware Supreme Court after years of litigation, placed him atop the annual executive compensation rankings published by C-Suite Comp, whose data covers approximately 3,700 public company chief executives and whose figures reflect fiscal year 2025 for most companies. The award was so large C-Suite Comp removed Musk as a statistical outlier before calculating broader market trends.
Exclude Musk, and median CEO total compensation rose 13% year-over-year to $4.75 million, while the average climbed 26% to $8.96 million. Both figures continue a recovery that began in 2024, after median pay declined in 2022 and 2023. The CEO-to-worker pay gap continued widening: The median pay ratio reached 99-to-1 in 2025, up from 92-to-1 in 2024, 85-to-1 in 2023, and 84-to-1 in 2022. The average pay ratio jumped to 216-to-1 from 175-to-1 the prior year.
Following the SpaceX and Tesla founder, the rankings were dominated by equity-heavy packages. Figma CEO Dylan Field took home $864.4 million—$861.9 million of it in stock awards—making him the second-highest-paid chief executive in the dataset. Welltower CEO Shankh Mitra followed at $821.1 million, with $813.2 million in stock. Opendoor Technologies CEO Kaz Nejatian ranked fourth at $741.1 million, his entire package in stock awards. Rivian CEO Robert Scaringe rounded out the top five at $402.6 million, the bulk of it in option awards.
