Musk’s pay under a SpaceX-Tesla merger: voting control, but no $1 trillion payday

Elon Musk’s recent super-sized pay packages at SpaceX (SPCX.O), opens new tab and Tesla (TSLA.O), opens new tab were centered on some eye-popping goals: creating a 1 million-person human colony on Mars, putting a million robotaxis on the road and selling a million humanoid robots.

A merger combining Musk’s trillion-dollar rocket and electric vehicle firms would mean he might not ever need to meet those ​lofty targets to achieve his ultimate goal: control over his corporate empire.

Tesla paid Elon Musk 2.5m times more as CEO than its average worker in 2025

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. READ MORE