The wage gap between U.S. big-corporation CEOs and ordinary office workers widened again.
On the 27th, AP said that, according to an analysis by executive-pay data firm Equilar, the median compensation for CEOs at 337 Standard & Poor's (S&P) 500 corporations last year was $17.7 million (about 26.6 billion won). That was up 5.9% from 2024. By contrast, the median annual pay for employees at the same corporations rose only 4.7% to $89,744 (about 135 million won).
The growth rate gap is just over 1 percentage point, but the absolute dollar difference is far larger. At about half of the 337 corporations surveyed, midlevel employees would have to work 200 years to earn a CEO's one-year pay. That is up eight years from 192 years in 2024. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has required listed companies since 2018 to disclose CEO-to-worker pay ratios, and the ratio hit a record high again this year following last year.
The gap was especially steep at consumer and retail corporations with a high share of low-wage workers. At global beverage corporation Coca-Cola, the CEO's compensation was 1,739 times the employee median wage of $17,947. Off-price warehouse retailer TJ Maxx was even higher at 1,774 times. In sectors where store and logistics staff make up the majority of employees, the compensation gap stood out in particular.
Sara Anderson, who heads the Global Economy Project at the progressive-leaning think tank Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), told AP, "It's obscene to watch CEO pay keep soaring at a time when workers' families are suffering from skyrocketing living costs." IPS said signature drives are underway in San Francisco and Los Angeles to impose additional taxes on corporations with large CEO-to-worker pay gaps.
According to the U.S. Labor Department, wages and benefits for private-sector workers in 2025 rose an average 3.4%. The average annual wage for U.S. workers was $67,000 (about 101 million won). Including benefits such as health insurance, the figure came to $96,000 (about 144 million won). Experts said, "While the 4.7% wage growth for S&P 500 employees slightly outpaced inflation, it did not catch up with cumulative price increases."
At U.S. listed companies, CEO compensation and employee wages are calculated on fundamentally different bases. CEO pay disclosed by U.S. listed companies includes not only base salary, cash bonuses, and perks but also the fair value of stock awards, stock options, and performance shares granted to the CEO in the fiscal year. In this survey, the median base salary alone for CEOs was about $1.3 million. By contrast, the median value of stock awards was $10.9 million, more than eight times the base salary. That suggests the center of gravity in CEO compensation rests on stock rather than salary. Boards concentrate management responsibility and the duty to enhance shareholder value on the CEO, and grant stock awards worth from tens of millions to hundreds of millions of dollars if targets are met. Instead of broadly sharing the fruits of performance across employee groups, the structure funnels them heavily to the chief executive.
In this year's tally, Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, ranked a dominant No. 1 among those surveyed with $132.3 billion (about 198 trillion won) in compensation on an accounting-value basis for 2025. This amount is not cash received. It is the appraised value of a conditional stock award package that would vest to Musk in stages only if targets are achieved in stages over the next 10 years for Tesla's market capitalization, electric-vehicle sales, a robotaxi network, and Humanoid Robot commercialization goals. If Musk fails to meet the targets, the shares for that period will not vest to Musk.
By the same method, Shankh Mitra, CEO of Welltower, the largest U.S. healthcare real estate investment trust (REIT), received $821.1 million (about 1.23 trillion won) in compensation. It is a conditional award that vests only after meeting a 10-year service requirement. David Zaslav, CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, received $165 million (about 247.5 billion won), reflecting his role in leading Paramount–Skydance sale talks. Hock Tan, CEO of semiconductor corporation Broadcom, received a $205.3 million (about 308 billion won) long-term award package. Expansion of artificial intelligence (AI)-related revenue was included as a performance metric.
Heads of major Wall Street banks also made the high-compensation list. David Solomon of Goldman Sachs received $119 million, Jane Fraser of Citigroup received $95.8 million, and Charles Scharf of Wells Fargo received $94.5 million. Solomon's award was attributed to share price gains and improved earnings per share (EPS); Fraser's to her appointment as chair of Citigroup and a reorganization; and Scharf's to freeing Wells Fargo from prolonged regulatory oversight stemming from the fake-accounts scandal. Fraser was recorded as the highest-paid among the women CEOs included in the survey.
There were exceptions. Warren Buffett, chair of Berkshire Hathaway, received only $389,488 (about 588 million won). Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, covered a significant portion of his compensation as personal security expense.
U.S. institutional investors typically cast around 90% yes votes in shareholder say-on-pay ballots. But recently, some in U.S. politics and labor circles have grown more critical that CEO compensation has been inflated by macroeconomic cycles and the AI boom rather than executive ability. AP said that, despite nominal wage growth slightly outpacing inflation, ordinary workers are covering living costs by leaning on credit-card debt due to cumulative price shocks. With stock windfalls for the top 1% of executives and pressure on household finances occurring simultaneously, observers say political pressure for disclosure rules and extra taxation is likely to intensify.