Your answer embodies a point of view that I used to share. Namely "As long as I'm doing well, why should I have a problem with you doing even better?" But the discrepancies between the ordinary Joe and our plutocrats has become obscene. I asked Gemini a related question and got some interesting data.
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The most consistent tracking of this data comes from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), which measures the "realized compensation" (including salary, bonuses, and cashed-out stock options/awards) of CEOs at the 350 largest U.S. firms compared to a typical worker in their industry.
The baseline shifted over the last 60 to 75 years from a modest double-digit gap to a massive triple-digit chasm, peaking during stock market bubbles.
The Historical Timeline
| Era / Year | CEO-to-Worker Pay Ratio | The Context |
| 1950s–1960s | 21 to 1 (In 1965) | Executives were paid primarily in salary and bonuses. Corporate culture and high marginal tax rates discouraged extreme pay disparities. |
| 1970s | 31 to 1 (In 1978) | The ratio stayed relatively flat through the mid-70s before beginning a slow crawl upward as the economy shifted. |
| 1980s | 61 to 1 (In 1989) | Deregulation and the introduction of heavy stock-option packages began widening the gap in earnest. |
| 1990s | 121 to 1 (In 1995) | This matches the "factor of 10" growth you heard about (going from roughly 30-to-1 in the 70s to over 300-to-1 by the end of the 90s). |
| 2000 | 366 to 1 | The peak of the Dot-Com bubble. Because CEO pay became tied directly to the stock market via options, soaring stocks meant astronomical payouts. |
| 2021 | 408 to 1 | A historic high, driven by the massive stock market surge during the pandemic recovery. |
| Recent (2024) | 281 to 1 | While down from the 2021 peak due to shifting stock values and changes in corporate payouts, it remains vastly higher than any pre-1990s era. |
Sorting Out the "1,000 Times" Discrepancy
When you hear a figure like "1,000 times difference" today, it usually stems from one of two specific scenarios rather than the broad macroeconomic average:
- Individual Extremes: At specific massive corporations (like retail giants or tech firms with hundreds of thousands of low-wage part-time workers), the ratio frequently hits 1,000-to-1 or higher. For example, if a CEO pulls in $30 million mostly in stock and the median worker is a part-time retail employee making $30,000, the ratio is exactly 1,000-to-1.
- The 1,000% Growth Stat: You might also be crossing wires with a frequently cited growth metric: between 1978 and recent years, top CEO compensation grew by roughly 1,094% (adjusted for inflation), while typical worker compensation grew by just 26%.
The trajectory shows that what was once a relatively tight relationship between executive and worker pay completely uncoupled once equity and stock grants became the primary vehicle for corporate leadership compensation.
Fresh data for 2025 and early 2026 has recently been compiled. Because companies report their executive pay for the previous year during spring proxy seasons, the figures for fiscal year 2025 have just crystallized, giving us a clear view of where things stand right now in 2026.
The numbers show that
after a brief moderation in 2023 and 2024, CEO compensation experienced a massive surge in 2025, primarily driven by soaring stock awards linked to corporate investments in artificial intelligence and tech.
The gap has widened yet again, depending on which corporate index is measured.
1. The Broad S&P 500 Index (Associated Press/Equilar Study)
This tracking covers the chief executives across the entire S&P 500.
- Median CEO Pay (2025): $17.7 million, an increase of nearly 6% year-over-year.
- Median Employee Pay (2025): $89,744, up 4.7% year-over-year.
- The 2025 Pay Ratio: 200 to 1 > Note on this metric: This is a straight median-to-median comparison across the middle of the S&P 500. The analysts noted that across half of the companies surveyed, it would now take a typical employee 200 years to earn what their CEO makes in a single year.
2. The Mega-Cap Companies (The Equilar 100)
When looking specifically at the early disclosures of the top 100 largest U.S. public companies by revenue (companies with at least $1 billion in revenue where executive pay is heavily stock-dependent), the spike was much more severe.
- Median CEO Pay (2025): $29.4 million, which represents a massive 23.2% jump from the prior year.
- Median Employee Pay (2025): $99,229, up roughly 10%.
- The 2025 Pay Ratio: 341 to 1 (up from 300-to-1 the year before).
Key Drivers of the 2025/2026 Surge
- The Equity Spike: The median value of stock awards alone jumped 38.8% for mega-cap CEOs. Because boards heavily favor multi-year stock grants tied to performance milestones, the booming market valuation of these firms directly translated to larger realized packages.
- An Rise in "Perks": Interestingly, executive perquisites (like security details and private travel) saw an unprecedented spike of 17.7% to 24% across various studies. Industry analysts attribute this sharp rise to boards heavily expanding corporate security budgets for top executives following high-profile security incidents late in the prior year.
While the broad macroeconomic numbers from groups like the Economic Policy Institute (which use a specific "realized compensation" formula for the top 350 firms) are still finalizing their long-term weighted averages for this exact moment, the corporate disclosures clear the air: the gap is aggressively expanding back toward its pandemic-era highs.
