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Even for the richie rich, becoming a trillionaire is a tough dream
We compiled the data from the latest 2024 list of the Highest-Paid CEOs, shared by the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO).
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Staff Reporter - Tue, 28, Oct 2025
- 02:47 EDT
- 21
Representative image / AI generated
Elon Musk wants a $1 trillion pay package from Tesla. Unheard of. That’s the size of the economies of a clutch of decent-sized countries. In India, with an economy of over $4 trillion, that’s nearly a fourth! India's entire household savings, currently at $650 billion (18% of GDP), are projected to cross $1 trillion by 2030 – that’s five years from now!
How does Elon Musk's proposed $1 trillion package compare to the annual salaries of top American CEOs, particularly the world’s top four earners and high-earning Indian-origin CEOs in the U.S.?
We compiled the data from the latest 2024 list of the Highest-Paid CEOs, shared by the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO). For the uninitiated, it is a voluntary federation of 63 national and international labor unions claiming to represent nearly 15 million working people in the U.S. It is a long, long list, so we set a minimum annual pay cut-off of $20 million to make it manageable.
Let’s begin at the top: In 2024, QXO Brad Jacobs led the list with annual compensation of $189,367,735—the highest among conventional U.S. salaries. His pay was 3,825 times that of the median U.S. worker. For comparison, the median U.S. worker made $49,500 in 2024, a 3 percent increase from the previous year, according to the AFL-CIO.
The difference between Musk’s demand for $1 trillion (one followed by 12 zeroes, or 1000 billion) and Jacobs’ $189,367,735 —a simple calculation tells us —is $999,810,632,265. That’s $999 billion, give or take a few.
Jacobs is one of only four CEOs whose annual compensation exceeds a billion dollars. Of these four, one is Indian. According to the AFL-CIO list, the highest-paid Indian-origin CEO is Sridhar Ramaswamy, who leads the cloud-based data-warehousing company Snowflake. In 2024, he ranked fourth among all CEOs in annual compensation, earning $101,325,374, making him the top Indian-origin CEO by pay.
There are 27 Indian-American CEOs on the list earning below $1 billion and above the cut-off of $20 million.
Microsoft’s Satya Nadella tops the list with $79,106,183 in pay. In contrast, Google’s Sundar Pichai, another prominent Indian-American, does not appear. The AFL-CIO reports that his 2024 compensation was only $10,725,043. Meanwhile, Tesla’s Elon Musk is listed last with remuneration of zero dollars.
How come? AFL-CIO’s disclaimer explains the reason: “The CEO pay ratio may not equal the displayed CEO’s total compensation due to differing company methodologies in calculating pay ratios.”
This may also shed light on Pichai’s ranking within the list. Just to make things clear, the likes of Nadella, Pichai and Nikesh Arora have estimated net worth of much above $1 billion.
Here are the 27 Indian-American CEOs appearing in this list who drew at least $20 million in annual compensation, as per the AFL-CIO website (https://aflcio.org/paywatch/highest-paid-ceos):
- Microsoft’s Satya Nadella received $79,106,183
- Roadzen’s Rohan Malhotra $60,936,011
- Palo Alto Network’s Nikesh Arora $58,036,875
- Adobe’s Shantanu Narayen $52,390,182
- Soleno Therapeutics Anish Bhatnagar $51,160,430
- Nutanix Rajiv Ramaswami $51,143,711
- Astera Labs Jitendra Mohan $50,926,550
- Bloom Energy Corp KR Sridhar $44,961,745
- CRISPR Therapeutics Samarth Kulkarni $33,175,626
- ANSYS Inc Ajei Gopal $32,810,655
- Micron Technology Inc Sanjay Mehrotra $30,060,126
- Chewy Sumit Singh $29,317,400
- DigitalOcean Holdings Padmanabhan Srinivasan $28,200,994
- Maxlinear Kishore Seendripu $26,387,151
- Rocket Companies Varun Krishna $25,887,926
- Indian Business Machines Arvind Krishna $25,143,682
- Hubspot Yamini Rangan $24,857,546
- Tenet Healthcare Saum Sutaria $24,661,553
- Cricut Ashish Arora $21,699,888
- Vertex Pharmaceuticals Reshma Kewalramani $21,538,668
- Nextdoor Holdings Nirav Tolia $21,177,204
- Linde Sanjiv Lamba $20,696,088
- Osi Systems Deepak Chopra $20,683,518
- Mawson Infrastructure Group Rahul Mewawalla $20,263,055
- HCI Group Paresh Patel $20,200,846
- Welltower Shankh Mitra $20,200,824
- Emerson Electric Lal Karsanbhai $20,096,283
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