CEOs getting paid 281 times more than their workers is most assuredly a problem. But one CEO receiving a trillion-dollar pay package that’s 17 million times more than what their workers are paid is a whole different story.
Before we dive into our main discussion on CEO pay packages, we need to quickly recap what’s going on in Washington. Although it’s only been a week, it feels like ages ago that we were discussing Zohran Mamdani’s historic election, considering all that has happened in America since. On Monday night, eight senators—seven Democrats and one Independent voted with Republicans to pass a funding bill that would end what has become our nation’s longest government shutdown in history, albeit without the extension of healthcare subsidies that Democrats spent the last few weeks demanding. The government will not officially reopen, however, until that bill or another is passed by the House and signed by the president.
The Patriotic Millionaires made quite a splash in the media during the shutdown. After news broke last week that the Federal Aviation Administration would reduce 10% of flights at 40 airports across the country to help overworked air traffic controllers, we took the bold step of publicly calling for the grounding of luxury private jets over commercial flights. The call for action resonated with people and prompted news coverage in outlets such as Fast Company, PBS NewsHour, Fortune, The Guardian, Forbes, ABC News, and Al Jazeera.
Yesterday, our Founder and President, Erica Payne, also appeared on Katie Phang’s show to discuss the shutdown and our general work and mission at Patriotic Millionaires, including our legislative platform, The MONEY Agenda. Watch the full interview below:
If the last week was a normal news cycle, however, you likely would have heard a bit more about Elon Musk officially getting on a path to potentially become the world’s first trillionaire. Last Thursday, Tesla’s shareholders approved a stock-based compensation package for Musk worth almost $1 trillion. Shares will be awarded in twelve parts and, to get the full reward, Musk has to meet certain ambitious targets over the next ten years, like increasing Tesla’s stock market valuation 8-fold, selling one million humanlike robots, and netting 10 million subscribers to the company’s self-driving software.
The juxtaposition between Musk’s new pay package and 42 million Americans losing their federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits on account of the shutdown is such a tremendous moment in history that we decided to devote an entire Closer Look to it. Specifically, we thought it would be a good idea to situate the news in the larger context of obscene CEO pay in America. We’ll start by giving you some of the biggest statistics on CEO pay that caught our eye over the last year. Then we’ll explain why exorbitant pay packages are bad for both business and society, and close by offering solutions to the problem in the form of taxing the rich and paying the people.
Here’s how obscene CEO pay is in America right now
Before we address the enormity of Musk’s pay package, it’s worth taking stock of the eye-watering sums that his CEO peers are getting paid these days. Here are a few statistics on CEO pay and CEO-to-worker pay ratios that caught our eye over the last year:
- In 2024, CEOs at the top 350 companies were paid 281 times more than the typical worker. Their average annual compensation was $22,983,000. This is a far cry from what things were like in 1965, when CEOs were paid just 21 times as much as the typical worker.
- The CEO-to-worker pay ratio is even worse at the 100 S&P 500 companies with the lowest reported median worker pay. In 2024, the average CEO at those companies made 632 times more than the average median employee.
- Between 1978 and 2024, CEO pay grew 1,094%. Meanwhile, the typical worker’s compensation grew just 26%.
- Out of all S&P 500 companies, Starbucks had the highest CEO-to-worker pay ratio in 2024. On top of his commuter private jet, Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol received a compensation package worth $97,813,843, which was 6,666 times more than what Starbucks’ median employee received.
- The highest-paid CEO in 2024 was Brad Jacobs from QXO, Inc. He received $189 million in compensation.
CEO pay in America is pretty obscene, as they continue lining their own pockets with money that rightfully belongs to people who work for them. But if Musk manages to meet Tesla’s targets and gets his full trillion-dollar payout, he would skyrocket America’s CEO pay problem into the stratosphere.
We’ve told you before just how much money $1 trillion is. Here’s another way to think about it: $1 trillion is 100 times more than all of the S&P 500 CEOs’ compensation packages combined. If that’s not obscene, we don’t know what is.
Obscene CEO pay is bad for business
A few weeks ago, we explained why $1 billion was over and above what anyone would reasonably need to be incentivized to start a new business, develop a new product, etc. But $1 trillion is a whole ‘nother ball game. We’ll paraphrase one of our members, Abigail Disney, and say the following: if you need $1 trillion as an incentive to work hard and innovate, you’re kind of a sociopath.
Past a certain point, exorbitant payouts no longer incentivize innovation. We don’t know where that point is exactly, but the fact remains that, if increased innovation and profitability is what shareholders and corporate boards are after, they’re not going to get it by tacking on even more zeroes to executives’ paychecks.
This isn’t just a hunch. Research has found that firms that pay their CEOs higher sums don’t perform better than counterparts with less-handsomely-paid executives—and actually tend to perform worse. A 2016 study that analyzed 429 large US companies found that firms which paid their CEOs high sums exhibited poorer long-term stock market performance. Similar studies have shed light on the effects that gross wage disparities have on workers: they are less engaged with their work, less committed and loyal to their companies, and more likely to quit, which ultimately leads companies to be less profitable.
The story of one of our members, John Driscoll, highlights the good that can come from closing large pay disparities at the firm level. He became CEO of CareCentrix, a Connecticut-based healthcare services company, in 2013. At the time, its financials were in a pretty bad state. To turn the company around, John did something a bit unconventional by industry standards: he froze executive pay increases and used the savings to raise the company’s minimum wage from, at that time, $7.25 to $15 an hour. The result? In a few years, CareCentrix tripled in size and quadrupled in value due to the fact that John’s employees were more focused, motivated, and productive with more financial security under their belts.
You can read all about John’s story in the book that he co-authored with our Chair, Morris Pearl: Pay the People! Why Fair Pay is Good for Business and Great for America.
Obscene CEO pay is bad for society
Extreme wealth—and that includes obscene CEO payouts—is bad for society as a whole. It threatens the stability of our economy, our democracy, the freedom of the press and media, and even our planet.
You don’t need to look further than Elon Musk to understand this.
Musk’s companies, which have been subsidized to the tune of $38 billion by the federal government over the years, have been accused of operating as monopolies. In 2022, Musk bought the social media platform Twitter, now known as X. (Since then, the platform has seen a decline in users and advertisement revenue.)
Our 2023 report on private jets, which we co-released with the Institute for Policy Studies, found that Elon Musk was the worst private jet offender. In 2022, he took no less than 171 private flights and produced 2,112 tons of carbon emissions.
Musk was Trump’s biggest donor in the 2024 election cycle. That got him a front-row seat to the president’s inauguration and a leadership role in the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Musk left his role in a spectacularly acrimonious fashion in May 2025, but in his short tenure, he managed to set in motion a 12% reduction of the 2.4 million-strong federal workforce, including at agencies that conveniently have open investigations, pending complaints, or enforcement actions into/against Musk’s six companies.
Extreme wealth translates into extreme power, and Musk hasn’t been shy about using it. With his new pay package, he has openly admitted that he is more interested in the power that his payout would give him—he would control over 25% of Tesla’s stock, and have great influence over other shareholders—than the money itself.
Last Friday, one of our members, Scott Ellis, spoke to DW News about Musk’s historic pay package and the harms that excessive wealth poses to society. Watch his interview below:
Conclusion
CEOs like to argue that they are “worth” their eye-popping payouts. Many of us are corporate executives ourselves, and we can tell you definitively that they are wrong.
Is a CEO sitting on Zoom all day and watching the stock market tick up and down “worth” 281 times more to their company than their typical employee? And how about Elon Musk? What could he possibly be doing for Tesla that is “worth” 17 million times more than what other human beings at his company are doing?
Take it from us: no matter what they say or think, CEOs are not worth millions, billions, or trillions. They just control that much money. That’s bad for business and bad for society, and that’s why it’s so important we do something about it.
The good news is we know exactly what to do: tax the rich and pay the people. There are currently tax proposals, like the Tax Excessive CEO Pay Act and Curtailing Executive Overcompensation (CEO) Act which would effectively slap tax penalties on companies with large CEO-to-worker pay disparities. Raising workers’ wages—particularly the federal minimum wage—and strengthening their ability to form unions to collectively bargain for better wages would also go a long way in putting a check on executives’ payouts.
It’s bad enough that “billionaire” has become part of our vocabulary. We need to use our tax and wage systems to prevent “trillionaire” from becoming part of it too.