CEOs Are Pulling In Record Pay. Here Are Some Big Numbers.
These figures put corporate bosses’ ever-bigger paychecks into context
Pay for chief executives keeps hitting new highs, and it isn’t just Elon Musk’s multibillion-dollar pay package from Tesla.
CEOs making more than $100 million hit a four-year high in 2025 and nearly a dozen chiefs blew past the $200 million mark. More corporate bosses surpassed $50 million as well.
How to put such big numbers into context? Here are the figures that stand out in The Wall Street Journal’s annual CEO pay ranking, based on data from MyLogIQ:
$17.9 million
The middle-of-the-pack, or median, pay for S&P 500 CEOs in 2025, marking a new high.
16
The number you would have to multiply the combined pay of all other CEOs in the Journal’s 2025 ranking by to reach the size of Elon Musk’s $158 billion pay package.
Altogether, the Journal’s ranking includes 392 CEOs of S&P 500 companies, and their collective pay comes to $9.9 billion, excluding Musk. To make the cut, they had to be on the job at least a year, running companies that disclosed executive pay by May 30.
19 minutes
How long it would take Shankh Mitra, CEO of real-estate investment trust Welltower, to match the annual pay of his company’s median employee, spreading his 2025 pay package out over a single year.
Mitra’s package came to $821 million last year, making him 2025’s highest-paid CEO after Musk. The median Welltower employee earned $124,995, according to the company.
$2.75
The smallest pay package for a CEO in the Journal’s rankings. It went to Jack Dorsey of Block (his official title at the payments company is “Blockhead”).
That is actually a bump up from the $1.40 that Dorsey made at the end of his run leading Twitter, now X. It represented a penny for each character in the original limit for a tweet.
19
The percentage of CEO compensation paid, on average, in cash—meaning salary and bonus (excluding Musk’s all-stock bonanza). Most of the rest is in stock or options.
1,894
The ratio of CEO pay to the median employee’s annual income at auto-parts company Aptiv. It is the third-highest ratio after Tesla and Welltower. Pay for Aptiv CEO Kevin Clark was about $19 million, and Aptiv’s median employee made $10,162.
Aptiv said in securities filings that it includes its part-time and temporary employees in determining who its median employee is, including significant workforces in countries with wages below U.S. levels.
$389,488
Warren Buffett’s pay in 2025. All but $100,000 in salary went toward personal and home security expenses. Of course, Buffett’s 13.7% stake in Berkshire Hathaway means he also benefited significantly from the company’s 11% share-price gain in 2025.
$13.4 million
The median pay for CEOs running banks and bank holding companies. That was the lowest for any industry in the Journal’s ranking, though some bank CEOs earned much more. Jane Fraser of Citigroup, for instance, is No. 9 in the overall S&P 500 ranking, at $95.8 million.
The sector doesn’t include financial-services firms such as private-equity company Blackstone and investment banks like Goldman Sachs. For that group, the median CEO pay was $22.1 million.
On the other end of the spectrum, media and entertainment companies had the highest median CEO pay: $53.2 million.