The resurgence of nine-figure executive compensation packages has returned with notable force in 2025, as more U.S. CEOs surpassed the $100 million mark than in any year since 2021. Nearly a dozen chief executives earned more than $200 million, signaling a rebound in exceptionally high pay amid rising corporate profits and strong stock market performance.
Elon Musk’s record-breaking $158 billion compensation package from Tesla remains an outlier, dwarfing those of his peers. His 2025 pay deal, potentially valued at $1 trillion, eclipses the combined compensation of 391 other CEOs ranked by The Wall Street Journal. The second-highest CEO pay went to Shankh Mitra of Welltower, a real estate investment trust specializing in senior housing and healthcare, whose $82 million package is among the largest for public company executives in the last decade.
Mitra’s compensation primarily consists of stock grants, including a $789 million award granted in October 2025, with the underlying shares subsequently valued at over $1 billion. These awards are structured with performance contingencies: around half of the shares will vest by 2031 if he remains with the company, with the remainder contingent on Welltower’s market value increasing by 45 percent and outperforming several benchmarks over five years. Three other Welltower executives also received pay packages exceeding $100 million, marking the company as only the second in the past decade to grant nine-figure compensation to four executives in a single year.
This surge in executive pay is not solely driven by “moonshot” stock and option awards—large equity grants tied to ambitious targets introduced in the wake of Musk’s 2018 deal—but also broader upward trends. The median CEO pay among S&P 500 companies reached nearly $18 million in 2025, a new high, while the share of CEOs earning less than $10 million continued to decline. Approximately half of CEOs saw their total pay increase by at least 9.8 percent year over year.
While large equity awards are central to executive compensation, they come with conditions that can reduce or increase their ultimate value depending on company performance. Some CEOs’ pay levels remain disproportionate to shareholder returns. For instance, Robinhood Markets reported the highest shareholder return at 204 percent in the ranking but valued CEO Vladimir Tenev’s 2025 pay at just $3 million. However, Tenev also cashed in on a previous stock package from 2019 valued at $1.1 billion, after a 2021 grant originally worth $796 million was scrapped.
Top-performing companies have also delivered substantial paychecks to their executives. David Zaslav of Warner Bros Discovery, which ranked fourth in shareholder return, earned $165 million, while Broadcom’s Hock Tan, ranked seventh in performance, received $205 million. Both executives have had prior nine-figure compensation awards. Broadcom noted Tan will not receive additional equity until 2030 and can only earn new awards by meeting artificial intelligence–generated revenue targets.
Among finance chiefs, Welltower’s Tim McHugh emerged as the highest-paid chief financial officer in 2025 with $67 million, easily surpassing peers and many CEOs. His compensation exceeds that of Tesla CFO Vaibhav Taneja, who earned $139 million in 2024, and Alphabet CFO Anat Ashkenazi, the second-highest-paid CFO in 2025. McHugh’s package places him in the rare club of executives earning $100 million or more. Three CFOs broke the nine-figure threshold in 2025, reflecting a broader increase in finance chiefs’ pay.
Across the S&P 500, median CFO pay rose to $6 million in 2025 from approximately $5.8 million a year earlier. Equity awards, typically vested over multiple years and tied to stock performance or financial targets, constitute the majority of compensation for both CEOs and CFOs. The general rise in pay corresponds with strong market conditions and corporate earnings growth, despite ongoing consumer uncertainties and geopolitical tensions in the Middle East.