SpaceX’s record-breaking IPO has officially made CEO Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire, reigniting conversations around the growing pay gap between company leaders and the rest of the workforce. According to a compensation survey by the Associated Press, the average CEO compensation package increased 6 percent in 2025 to $17.7 million. Meanwhile, wages have barely kept up with inflation since 2020, leaving many workers feeling like they’re falling behind amid a rocky economy.
Top Wealthiest Tech CEOs
- Elon Musk
- Larry Page
- Sergey Brin
- Jeff Bezos
- Larry Ellison
To make matters worse, tech jobs are harder to come by these days. Artificial intelligence has often been blamed for disrupting the job market, with many employees pushing back against its use in the workplace. While it’s not entirely clear whether AI is responsible for fewer career opportunities, this narrative has only been reinforced by companies labeling the technology as the reason for mass layoffs.
These conditions have placed the spotlight back on tech CEOs, raising questions around the wealth they’ve amassed — and how they got it in the first place.
The Highest-Paid Tech CEOs
Many CEOs have adopted the practice of reducing their yearly salaries to $1, but this number can be misleading. We’re taking a deeper dive into how much some of the world’s richest tech leaders truly make and how they’ve built their fortunes.
1. Elon Musk
Elon Musk is a tech mogul who owns a vast business empire highlighted by the electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla and the aerospace company SpaceX. His other companies include the internet broadband company Starlink, the AI startup xAI (now owned by SpaceX), the transportation infrastructure company The Boring Company and the neurotechnology company Neuralink.
How Much He’s Paid
Musk gets his income from his most prominent businesses, namely SpaceX and Tesla. According to its amended IPO filing, SpaceX has paid Musk a base salary of $54,080 since 2019. But the real money comes from Musk’s shares in the company.
The filing notes that Musk is being awarded 1.3 billion Class B shares, which become available upon SpaceX hitting specific performance targets. Those include forming a Mars colony with at least 1 million people, generating 100 terawatts of compute per year with orbital data centers and raising SpaceX’s valuation to reach “market capitalization milestones.” In the aftermath of SpaceX’s historical IPO, these shares are likely worth hundreds of billions of dollars.
Unlike SpaceX, Tesla doesn’t give Musk a base salary, tying his earnings entirely to the company’s stock market performance. While Tesla shareholders rewarded Musk with a $1 trillion pay package in 2025, it consists of roughly 424 million shares spaced out over 12 market capitalization and operational milestones that Tesla must hit under Musk’s leadership.
How He Made His Fortune
In 1995, Musk founded his first company, Zip2. After allegedly borrowing $28,000 from his father to get the business off the ground, Musk sold Zip2 to Compaq Computer Corp. for more than $300 million in 1999. He then founded the online payments company X.com, which merged with rival Confinity to form the digital payments platform PayPal in 2000. Holding an 11.7 percent stake in the company, Musk made $180 million when he sold PayPal to eBay in 2002.
Musk would go on to make the fateful decision of using part of his earnings from the PayPal acquisition to found SpaceX that same year. Another critical moment came in 2004 when Tesla founders Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning enlisted Musk’s help to raise more funds for their fledgling startup. As an early investor and chair of the board, Musk gradually gained enough influence to seize control of the business, oust Eberhard and Tarpenning and win legal recognition as one of the founders of Tesla.
Of course, the rest is history. Musk is now known as a key member of the “PayPal Mafia” — a group of former PayPal employees and founders who have gone on to form other companies that have reshaped the tech landscape. And as the largest shareholder of both SpaceX and Tesla, Musk’s stakes in the two companies make up a substantial portion of his portfolio.
2. Larry Page
Larry Page is the co-founder of Google, alongside Sergey Brin. As a graduate student at Stanford University, Page developed a search engine algorithm called PageRank that ranked each website based on how many pages linked back to it. This would serve as the backbone of Google — a name that comes from “googol,” a large number with the digit “1” followed by 100 zeros.
How Much He’s Paid
Page officially limited his salary to $1 per year in 2004 during Google’s historic IPO, ensuring his wealth depended solely on the company’s market performance. As of the beginning of 2026, Page remains Google’s top shareholder with more than 389 million Class B shares in Alphabet, Google’s parent company.
How He Made His Fortune
Page and Brin co-founded Google as a private company in 1998, with Brin serving as CEO. The pair crowdsourced their first $1 million from family, friends and investors before receiving $25 million in venture capital in 1999. Although Page ceded his CEO position to Eric Schmidt in 2001, he transitioned to president of products and remained the largest individual shareholder in the company. In 2004, Page owned 15.7 percent of the company’s outstanding shares, which yielded $3 billion when Google went public.
Holding on to his shares in Google has allowed Page to maintain his place among the world’s wealthiest entrepreneurs. Google’s share values spiked when it acquired YouTube in 2006, cementing the company’s grip on the internet and padding Page’s wealth. And upon the release of its Gemini 3 model at the end of 2025, Alphabet’s stock skyrocketed, making Page the second-richest person on Earth behind only Elon Musk with a net worth close to $300 billion, according to Forbes.
3. Sergey Brin
Sergey Brin is the other half of Google’s founding team. Brin attended Stanford University at the same time as Page, who recruited him for his deep knowledge in data mining. The two would publish a renowned research paper in 1998 describing their search engine, Google, and its approach to crawling and indexing the web.
How Much He’s Paid
Like his fellow co-founder, Brin agreed to take a $1 annual salary in 2004 before Google’s IPO. After all, he doesn’t need a salary as the second-largest individual shareholder in Alphabet, owning 362 million Class B shares or 42 percent of outstanding shares.
How He Made His Fortune
Brin’s path to success mirrors Page’s. When the two founded Google in 1998, Brin was the company’s first president and would pivot to president for technology in 2001. Upon Google going public in 2004, Brin owned 15.6 percent of the company’s outstanding shares, giving him $3 billion of his own.
Retaining his shares is how Brin has grown his wealth as well. Google’s planned collaboration with Apple on AI initiatives helped propel Brin up to number three on the list of the world’s wealthiest people. It also doesn’t hurt that he returned to Google after a brief retirement to spearhead the development of its Gemini models, keeping the company in the race to catch rival Anthropic and its Claude Code tool. As a result, Brin still sits comfortably in third with a net worth above $260 billion.
4. Jeff Bezos
Jeff Bezos is best known as the founder of Amazon, an e-commerce behemoth he famously founded in a rented Seattle garage in 1994, originally to sell books online. In 2000, he also founded an aerospace company called Blue Origin, which he continues to fund with his own wealth and is on track to become an integral part of NASA’s upcoming Moon missions.
How Much He’s Paid
Bezos continues to receive the same annual salary from Amazon of $81,400, with most of his wealth coming from company stock. Despite transitioning from CEO to executive chairman in 2021, Bezos is still Amazon’s largest shareholder, owning more than 883 million shares at the end of 2025, or more than 8 percent of the company’s outstanding shares. His remaining shares are currently worth between $200 billion and $230 billion.
How He Made His Fortune
After spending his 20s working in the financial sector, Bezos became enthralled by the internet’s 2,300 percent growth rate in 1994. He came up with the idea of an online marketplace for selling books and convinced family, friends and other investors to give him his first $1 million. VC firm Kleiner Perkins invested an additional $8 million in Amazon in 1996, giving Bezos the funds to scale the business beyond just selling books.
In 1997, Amazon officially went public at $18 per share. The company has been on an upward trajectory ever since, surpassing $574 billion in net sales and $30 billion in net income in 2023, according to Statista.
Amazon is only part of the story behind Bezos’ wealth, though. Over the years, Bezos himself has made some smart investments, most notably contributing $250,000 to Google in 1998 — an investment that ballooned to $280 million during the company’s 2004 IPO. Bezos also reportedly made $400 million off an early investment in Uber, and another investment in Airbnb likely yielded millions of dollars. These timely decisions have solidified Bezos as the world’s fourth-richest person, with a net worth of more than $240 billion.
5. Larry Ellison
Larry Ellison is a co-founder of Oracle, one of the world’s largest enterprise software companies and a pioneer in relational database technology. Originally founded in 1977 as Software Development Laboratories, Oracle’s software powers the operations of thousands of businesses, institutions and governments worldwide. Ellison has served as the company’s CEO, chief technology officer and chairman for almost 40 years, overseeing its expansion from databases into areas like cloud infrastructure and artificial intelligence.
How Much He’s Paid
Ellison is among the list of CEOs who earn an annual salary of $1, making his fortune by holding onto his shares in Oracle over the course of decades. In May 2025, Ellison was awarded an additional 5 million shares at $51.13 each, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. That brought his total amount of shares to more than 1.15 billion, worth $257 billion at the end of 2025, according to another filing.
How He Made His Fortune
Keeping his Oracle shares has proven to be a wise choice for Ellison. The company gained renewed attention when it was tasked with overseeing U.S. user data for the new American TikTok app after its temporary ban, and the AI boom’s demand for compute has led to lucrative deals for access to its data centers. These factors have boosted Oracle’s recent performance, resulting in Ellison briefly surpassing Musk as the world’s richest person in 2025.
Ellison also employs an unusually aggressive spending strategy, borrowing against his Oracle shares to secure bold deals. This approach has led him to make major commitments to Tesla and Paramount Skydance. In fact, he served on Tesla’s board of directors for four years and owns 77.5 percent of shares in Paramount Skydance, a business headed by his son, David Ellison.
The elder Ellison can expect more profits from these companies, considering Tesla’s work on its Optimus robot and Paramount’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery — a deal that he himself helped finance. His net worth may have fallen below $220 billion, but it could quickly rebound with strong showings from Oracle, Tesla and Paramount.
What the Growing Pay Gap Means for the Tech Industry
More AI-induced layoffs have many people worried about a precarious future where workers are at the economic mercy of this technology. Meanwhile, a small collection of U.S. CEOs are thriving, with less than a dozen securing $200 million pay packages in 2025.
This contrast between company leaders and the rest of the workforce hasn’t been lost on CEOs, who have begun offering solutions to placate workers. For instance, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang suggested awarding engineers with “AI tokens” on top of their base salaries to incentivize them to deploy AI agents. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has gone even further, proposing that the U.S. government receive a stake in OpenAI to contribute to a “Public Wealth Fund” that benefits everyday individuals.
At the same time, some leaders are paying the price for pressuring employees to ramp up their AI usage and are now reconsidering their spending. Slower AI adoption among businesses could reignite chatter around a potential AI bubble that would deliver a devastating blow to the economy if it bursts. Either way, CEOs and tech leaders must move with greater urgency to develop a plan that shields workers from the worst effects of AI’s rise and fall before general anxiety around the technology evolves into widespread social unrest.
Frequently Asked Questions
How did tech CEOs get their wealth?
Rather than a typical annual salary, many tech CEOs have acquired their wealth by buying large amounts of company shares. These shares skyrocketed in value when their businesses went public, and CEOs continue to profit from holding onto their shares. Some CEOs have also added to their wealth by making prescient investments. Jeff Bezos is a prominent example, having been an early investor in Google, Uber and Airbnb.
Who are the richest tech leaders behind Elon Musk?
The SpaceX IPO made Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire, solidifying his position as the wealthiest individual on Earth by a long shot. While the rankings have shuffled through the years, here are the other tech leaders with vast fortunes:
- Google co-founder Larry Page
- Google co-founder Sergey Brin
- Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos
- Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison
How large is the current pay gap between CEOs and typical workers?
The pay gap between CEOs and employees continues to widen. A compensation survey by the Associated Press revealed that the average CEO compensation package rose 6 percent in 2025 to $17.7 million. In fact, the Wall Street Journal found that almost a dozen U.S. CEOs received pay packages that exceeded $200 million last year. At the same time, wages have just kept pace with inflation since 2020, giving workers the sense that they’re falling further behind.
How are tech leaders proposing to solve the widening wealth gap?
Tech CEOs are considering a variety of solutions to keep the wealth gap from growing further. For example, in light of the job threat posed by AI agents, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has proposed supplementing engineers’ base salaries with “AI tokens” to reward them for deploying agents. And OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has called for more drastic measures, discussing with Trump administration officials the idea of a government stake in the company and others that could help finance a “Public Wealth Fund” to support workers in the age of automation.
