By Meron Lemmi
While a growing number of households are turning to buy now pay later loans just to keep food on the table, the nation’s top executives are cashing in with incomprehensibly astounding compensation packages. In 2025, more than two-thirds of workers were living paycheck to paycheck — up 4 percent from the year before. Grocery prices, housing costs, and healthcare expenses have kept climbing, making life more difficult for the vast majority of families struggling to keep their heads above water as the cost of living has dramatically outpaced wage growth.
It is against this backdrop of the financial strain and growing economic hopelessness among the working and middle class that Tesla recently proposed rewarding Elon Musk with the first ever trillion dollar executive pay package. If we needed a clear sign that things have gotten out of hand, this is it.
Musk’s proposed compensation is staggering, but it is also part of a wider and troubling trend. “His own median worker is making $57,000 while he is awarded a pay package that could add up to $1 trillion by being a part-time C.E.O.,” Natalia Renta, AFR’s Associate Director for Corporate Governance & Power told the New York Times. “It’s just very outrageous.” According to the latest AFL-CIO Paywatch, the average CEO of an S&P 500 company earned a staggering $18.9 million in 2024. That’s 285 times the typical worker’s earnings, up from the already troubling 268-to-1 the prior year. For companies that pay the lowest wages, the gap is even more grotesque. The Institute for Policy Studies found that at the “Low-Wage 100” corporations, the CEO-to-worker pay ratio widened by 12.9 percent, ballooning to 632-to-1.
This overblown executive compensation often comes at the direct expense of a company’s workers. Instead of investing in higher wages, better benefits, or worker safety and training, those profits are funneled to the very top, without care for the long-term effects on the company or rising levels of inequality. This is not happening in a vacuum. Excessive executive compensation, along with the policies that enable it, is a symptom of a much larger problem. Today, corporate and billionaire interests consistently take precedence over workers, communities, and the public. Our economy, Congress, and regulatory agencies are supposed to serve the people, but they seem to be working just for the elite.
Instead of using their power to address runaway economic inequality, our elected officials often seem to be doing the bidding of their corporate donors to the detriment of everyone else. For example, the Americans for Tax Fairness analysis of the “Big Ugly Tax Scam Act” details how this legislation will funnel money to the wealthiest individuals and corporations: it opens loopholes for corporations to pay less in taxes, lavishes the top 20 percent of households with with 70 percent of the tax cuts in 2026, and gives the top 1 percent $1 trillion in tax breaks over the next decade — all while taking away healthcare from 17 million people and nutritional assistance from 3 million to pay for it. Additionally, AFL-CIO’s analysis found the average S&P 500 CEO received a tax cut of nearly $500,000 — that’s 639 times bigger than the tax break the median worker received.
Meanwhile, regulators appear to be working on behalf of the very industries they are meant to oversee. Despite the overinflated executive compensation, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) recently hosted an executive compensation roundtable that seems to set the stage to weaken critical executive pay disclosures. The SEC wants to make it harder for the public to access executive pay information because the numbers are indefensible.
Some in Congress are pushing back against out of control executive pay. Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Rashida Tlaib have reintroduced the Tax Excessive CEO Pay Act and Representative Mark DeSaulnier has reintroduced the CEO Accountability and Responsibility Act. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez led the CEO Pay Act in past sessions. These bills share the same goal: to impose a tax on companies with extreme CEO-to-worker pay ratios. This type of legislation would use our tax code to hold corporations accountable and incentivize them to invest in their workers, not just their C-suite.
Ultimately, this fight is about more than just tax arcana and numbers and pay gap percentages; it’s about the type of economy and government we want to have. Do we want the government to serve working people or just for billionaires and corporate interests? Corporate greed is out of control, and it’s time to remind our politicians and corporate leaders that the foundation of our economy isn’t the stock market, but the hard work of over 100 million working people.