MARCO BELLO/Getty Images
Some CEOs are paid to maximize shareholder value. Others choose to signal confidence in their companies by taking little or no salary, relying instead on their equity stakes, and 2025 showcased just how vast those differences can become.
On the high end (1) was Elon Musk, whose compensation from Tesla came to $158 billion, the biggest executive-pay packages for the CEO of a public-company in the past decade. At the other end (1) of the scale was Block’s Jack Dorsey, who took home $2.75.
Must Read
Not $2.75 million, mind you. Two dollars and 75 cents. And, for Dorsey, that was nearly double what he made when he was running Twitter. In those days, he earned $1.40 per year, one penny for each character in the company’s original maximum for Tweets.
Why 2025 was unlike any other year for CEO pay
Admittedly, Musk definitely skewed the curve in 2025. His compensation package was about 16 times higher than the combined compensation packages of the 391 other CEOs ranked by The Wall Street Journal’s annual ranking (2) of CEO compensation packages. Collectively, the also-rans made $9.9 billion in 2025.
The Wall Street Journal found that the median compensation package for an S&P 500 CEO last year was $17.9 million, a new high. On average, just 19% of that amount is paid in cash, including salary and bonuses. The rest is stock or options. (That percentage ignores Musk’s all-stock payday.)
That’s likely to be little comfort, however, to a company’s workforce. The difference between a CEO’s pay package and the average worker varies by company and industry. But to put the number into perspective, Kevin Clark, the CEO of auto parts company Aptiv, made around $19 million last year. The median employee salary was $10,162. That makes Clark’s compensation 1,894 times higher than the median (and even higher than that for half of the workforce).
Don’t Miss: Paying too much for car insurance? 3 clever (and free) ways to slash your bill today
The 10 highest-paid CEOs of 2025
Musk’s compensation package dwarfed everyone else’s in 2025. But even after removing him from the equation, there was another steep drop: Welltower CEO Shankh Mitra earned more than three times as much as the third-highest-paid executive.
Mitra received compensation worth $821 million last year, a 3,965% increase from 2024. Nearly all of it came from stock awards, including a $789 million grant awarded in October. Under the terms of the package, he’ll receive half the shares if he remains with the company through 2031, with the remainder tied to the company’s performance milestones.
Musk dominated the rankings, but he wasn’t alone. More CEOs received compensation packages worth at least $100 million in 2025 than in any year since 2021, according to the Journal’s analysis (3).
Here’s who made the top 10.
Elon Musk (Tesla): $158 billion
Shankh Mitra (Welltower): $821 million
George Kurtz (Crowdstrike Holdings): $248 million
Hock Tan (Broadcom): $205 million
David Zaslav (Warner Bros. Discovery): $165 million
Stephen Schwarzman (Blackstone): $126 million
David Solomon (Goldman Sachs): $119 million
Nikesh Arora (Palo Alto Networks): $100 million
Jane Fraser (Citigroup): $96 million
Charles Scharf (Wells Fargo): $95 million
You May Also Like
Join 250,000+ readers and get Moneywise’s best stories and exclusive interviews first — clear insights curated and delivered weekly. Subscribe now.
Article Sources
We rely only on vetted sources and credible third-party reporting. For details, see our ethics and guidelines.
The Wall Street Journal (1), (2), (3)
This article originally appeared on Moneywise.com under the title: Jack Dorsey received a salary of just $2.75 last year, while nearly a dozen of his contemporaries made $200 million
This article provides information only and should not be construed as advice. It is provided without warranty of any kind.