Elon Musk Tesla Salary: CEO Earned $6.7 Billion In 2020

Elon Musk was the highest-paid CEO in 2020, the third year in a row he has topped the list, according to a report.

The Tesla chief executive and co-founder received $6.7 billion in professional compensation last year, 11 times more than the second-highest-paid CEO in the U.S., according to Bloomberg's annual Pay Index report covering the year 2020.

Musk’s 2020 earnings dwarfed that of Mike Pykosz, CEO of Oak Street Health, who ranked second on the list after being awarded $568 million in a combination of salary, bonuses, stocks, options and perks.

The SpaceX founder's compensation is also double that of the combined total of the other nine individuals on the top 10 list, which is around $3 billion, according to Business Insider.

Other executives who made this year's top 10 are healthcare company GoodRx's co-CEOs Doug Hirsch and Trevor Bezdek, Opendoor's Eric Wu and Apple's Tim Cook.

Cook’s compensation nearly doubled in 2020 to $265 million, but his placement on the rankings fell from no. 2 in 2019 to no. 8 last year. According to Bloomberg, this was due to an increase in the number of executives receiving “Musk-like” awards.

Musk's award has yielded him about $33 billion of paper gains, making him America's highest-paid executive for three consecutive years, according to the Bloomberg Pay Index.

The South Africa-born tech entrepreneur is paid stock options awarded to him as part of the compensation deal he signed with Tesla in 2018, when the electric vehicle maker had a market cap of $50 billion.

In his compensation plan, the billionaire would get rights to stock options at various market cap milestones, according to Celebrity Net Worth. The plan includes 12 “tranches,” and the first “tranche” came when Tesla hit $100 billion in market cap. Musk will receive compensation every time the company's market cap increases by $50 billion, all the way up to $650 billion.

“For Musk, none of it is salary,” Bloomberg’s Anders Melin said. “He gets only paid in stock options that grow in value if Tesla’s share price goes up. And Tesla share prices have been on a tear for the past few years, so this package has become worth quite a bit of money.”

Tesla's market cap is currently $690 billion.

Musk remains the second richest person in the world, with an estimated net worth of $190 billion as of Monday, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.