[Opinion. You probably have enough to live on or you couldn’t be wasting your time on AN. The wealth gap today is far greater than it was in the time of the robber barons before it all collapsed in 1929. People committed suicide…over money! Do the super-rich give back enough to their fellow human beings to deserve that wealth? At a certain point, money just keeps on making more money. That’s why we don’t have to raise taxes. Just confiscate anything over, what, $20M and use it for the public good. You know these rich a-holes are driven. They’ll just go out and make more anyway!] Tesla paid Elon Musk 2.5m times more as CEO than its average worker in 2025 Tech billionaire’s $158.3bn deal an outlier in report showing widening gap of CEO to worker pay at top companies Michael Sainato The Guardian: 13 Aug 2026 SOURCE: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/aug/13/elon-musk-tesla-pay-workers Elon Musk received over 2.5m times as much compensation at Tesla as the company’s average worker, according to a new report on the growing gap between top corporate executives and their workers. Musk’s $158.3bn pay deal was an outlier but came as the gap between CEO and worker pay continued to grow. Excluding Musk, last year the average ratio of CEO to worker pay for the top S&P 500 companies was 312 to 1, up from a 285:1 ratio in 2024. With Musk, the average pay ratio was 5,387:1, according to the executive pay watch report released this week by the AFL-CIO, the largest federation of labor unions in the US. “In 2025, Elon Musk received the median Tesla worker’s pay every 4.23 seconds – less time than it takes to read this sentence,” states the report. “A majority of S&P 500 CEOs made more in one day than the median US worker made in one year.” Average CEO pay, excluding Musk, was $22.8m in 2025, up from $18.9m in 2024. With Tesla accounted for, the average increases to $340.1m. The report notes workers’ share of US national income has fallen to the lowest level since the second world war. The report also looks at Donald Trump’s income in 2025. At $2.2bn, largely from his crypto holdings, Trump’s income rose nearly 254% from 2024. The median US worker would require 43,154 years to earn what Trump received in 2025. “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,” said Fred Redmond, AFL-CIO’s secretary-treasurer.
