Elon Musk, the chief executive of SpaceX and Tesla, topped Fortune's new list of the most highly compensated CEOs on the Fortune 500. In 2021, Musk “realized” compensation worth almost $23.5 billion, from exercising some Tesla stock options awarded in a 2018 multiyear “moonshot” grant. That was—by far—the biggest CEO payday in 2021, according to our new analysis of how Fortune 500 CEOs are compensated.
After Musk, the 10 most highly compensated Fortune 500 CEOs of 2021 are all tech and biotech CEOs, including the heads of Apple, Netflix, and Microsoft. The full list is below.
CEO pay dwarfs that of the average employee. The average big-company CEO made 351 times the pay of the average worker on a realized basis in 2020, according to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), which has tracked the metric for decades, up from a 21-to-1 ratio back in 1965.
Our analysis evaluated the pay packages of 280 Fortune 500 CEOs, who earned a median total compensation of $15.9 million, up 30% from a year earlier. When calculating a CEO’s total realized pay, we measured the following for the company’s most recent fiscal year: salary and bonuses; other compensation such as vested restricted stock grants, long-term incentive payouts and perks; and stock gains in the form of value realized from exercising stock options. Because the value of unexercised options is unpredictable, we did not consider them in our tabulation of total compensation.
Here are the highest-paid CEOs:
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Elon Musk, Tesla: $23.5 billion
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Tim Cook, Apple: $770.5 billion
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Jensen Huang, NVIDIA, $561 billion
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Reed Hastings, Netflix: $453.5 billion
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Leonard Schleifer, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals: $452.9 billion
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Marc Benioff, Salesforce: $439.4 billion
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Satya Nadella, Microsoft: $309.4 million
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Robert A. Kotick, Activision Blizzard: $296.7 million
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Hock E. Tan, Broadcom: $288 million
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Safra A. Catz, Oracle: $239.5 million
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