The $100-million-plus CEO is back with a bang, just a year after nine-figure pay packages seemed to be fading.
More U.S. CEOs last year crossed the once-rare pay threshold than in any year since 2021—and nearly a dozen topped $200 million.
Their compensation looked like crumbs, of course, compared with Elon Musk’s $158 billion pay package from Tesla, which set a new record and is about 16 times the combined value for all 391 other chiefs in The Wall Street Journal’s annual CEO pay ranking. (Musk’s deal could ultimately be worth $1 trillion.)
Still, No. 2 Shankh Mitra reached $821 million from Welltower, a real-estate investment trust focused on senior housing and healthcare. That lands him one of the biggest executive-pay packages for a public-company CEO over the past decade, data from MyLogIQ show.
Explore how CEOs compare on pay, performance and more with the interactive table at the end of this article.
The last time Musk’s compensation set records, in 2018, it paved the way for a surge in so-called moonshot pay packages: massive stock or option awards tied to ambitious, multiyear targets. (The evidence suggests they often don’t pay off for executives or investors.)
It took several years for momentum to build then. Now, companies seem to be anticipating a shift.
Just over half the CEOs making over $100 million last year ran companies outside the S&P 500, meaning they aren’t included in the Journal’s ranking. They include Dylan Field of design-software company Figma, at $864 million, and Kaz Nejatian of Opendoor Technologies, an online real-estate transaction platform, at $741 million.
Moonshots weren’t the only factor pushing up pay. Overall, median CEO pay rose to nearly $18 million at S&P 500 companies in 2025—a new high—the Journal found in its analysis of MyLogIQ’s data. More executives made over $50 million, and the share making under $10 million shrank further.
Half the chiefs got year-over-year raises of 9.8% or more.
Most big companies pay their CEOs primarily in stock options or restricted stock, often with strings attached: They receive fewer shares if the company does poorly over time—or more, if it succeeds. As a result, what executives ultimately reap can vary significantly from the value companies first report. (Often, they wind up with more.)
At Welltower, 99% of Mitra’s pay came from stock grants, including $789 million awarded in October. By year-end, the company said shares underlying the award were valued at just over $1 billion, securities filings show.
Mitra stands to receive about half the shares in 2031 as long as he stays, and the rest if Welltower’s market value rises 45% and the company’s shares beat multiple stock indexes by a wide enough margin over five years.
Three other Welltower executives also received packages valued at more than $100 million apiece, making it only the second company in a decade to have four nine-figure executives in a single year, according to MyLogIQ. Welltower said the awards replace bonuses and equity for a decade and are designed to align their incentives with shareholders’.
How much CEOs were paid often bore little relation to shareholder return.
Robinhood Markets, the trading platform, notched the best shareholder return in the Journal’s ranking, at 204%. The company valued CEO Vladimir Tenev’s compensation at $3 million for the year.
But Tenev was able to cash in on a pay package from 2019, bringing the CEO stock valued at $1.1 billion, securities filings show. (Tenev and the company agreed to scrap a 2021 pay package originally valued at $796 million.) Robinhood said the full 2019 award vested only after company shares more than doubled from its 2021 IPO price.
Two of the highest-paid CEOs ran top-performing companies: Warner Bros. Discovery ranked fourth by performance and reported pay of $165 million for David Zaslav. Broadcom, ranked seventh in performance, said total pay for Hock Tan reached $205 million.
Both men have scored nine-digit pay packages before—$247 million for Zaslav in 2021 and Tan’s $162 million in 2023. Broadcom said Tan won’t get more equity through 2030 and can earn the awards only by meeting targets for revenue from artificial intelligence.
