Tesla Inc.'s soaring stock price produced a nearly $23.5 billion windfall for Elon Musk last year, making him the highest-paid CEO at publicly traded U.S. companies in the auto industry by far, according to the Automotive News/Equilar CEO Compensation study.
Most other CEOs in the industry got sizable pay increases in 2021 as well, even though none came remotely close to matching the value of Musk's stock options alone. The median for all CEOs was $12.3 million, which represents a 78 percent increase over the median of those same CEOs on last year's list, which was $6.9 million.
For CEOs who have been in their positions for at least two years, median compensation rose 90 percent from 2020, said Courtney Yu, Equilar's director of research.