A new analysis released Tuesday by the Economic Policy Institute finds that CEO pay in the United States rose by a staggering 1,322% between 1978 and 2020 — a sharp contrast to the pay increase of the typical worker, which was just 18% during that same period.

In 2020, a year of pandemic and widespread economic dislocation, the top executives at the largest public firms in the U.S. were paid 351 times as much as the typical worker, with CEO pay measured by salary, bonuses, long-term incentive payouts, and exercised stock options. According to Bloomberg, Tesla’s billionaire CEO Elon Musk was the highest-paid corporate executive in the U.S. in 2020.

Highlighting the extent to which inequality has soared in recent decades, EPI observes in its report that the CEO-to-worker-pay ratio was 61-to-1 in 1989.

CEOs saw their compensation increase by 18.9% between 2019 and 2020 while the pay of typical workers — those who were able to hold on to their jobs amid mass layoffs stemming from the pandemic — rose just 3.9% over that time, EPI shows.

“Even that wage growth is overstated,” notes EPI, which has been tracking and documenting executive pay trends for years. “Perversely, high job loss […]