Elon Musk’s record-setting compensation packages from Tesla and SpaceX are reshaping executive CTC across corporate America, with S&P 500 boards increasingly using them as a benchmark for larger CEO pay, an American Federation of Labour and Congress of Industrial Organisations study found, according to a Reuters report.

Excluding Musk, the average compensation for S&P 500 chief executives jumped 21% to a record $22.8 million in 2025, data released on Thursday by the AFL-CIO showed. It was the highest figure since the AFL-CIO began tracking CEO pay in the 1990s.

Labour officials attributed the increase to a growing number of mega-pay packages inspired by Musk’s Tesla compensation plan, which could be worth as much as $1 trillion if he meets all its targets.

Tesla shareholders approved the restricted-stock plan in November, with the company valuing it at $158 billion. Including that amount, average S&P 500 CEO compensation reached $340.1 million last year, according to the AFL-CIO’s latest Paywatch study.

Musk also became the world’s first trillionaire based on his stake in satellite and AI company SpaceX.

Musk’s pay “changes the dynamic when other CEO compensation plans come up, boards use it as a reference,” Fred Redmond, the AFL-CIO’s secretary-treasurer, told Reuters in a telephone interview.
Meanwhile, employee wages are being held back by the rise of artificial intelligence and a Republican-led National Labour Relations Board, which labour leaders view as hostile to union-organising efforts, Redmond said.Excluding Musk’s Tesla compensation, the average CEO-to-worker pay ratio at S&P 500 companies widened to 312:1 last year from 285:1 in 2024. Including Musk’s package, the ratio reached 5,387:1.

“As we talk to our members, they’re pissed off over what’s happening to them, and they feel as though they should be more vocal in terms of calling attention to inequality,” Redmond said.

He noted that union representation had reached its highest level in 16 years.

Rising CEO pay and inequality have fed into broader political debates over why US workers struggle to afford housing, healthcare and other necessities.

The mean annual wage for US workers was $69,770 in May 2025, up 3% from a year earlier, according to Labour Department data.

Corporate compensation committees often argue that executive pay plans are tied to shareholder value and incentivise executives to deliver results. They also note that investors, including the largest asset managers, usually support such proposals at annual meetings.

Average shareholder support for advisory “say-on-pay” votes at S&P 500 companies stood at 90.6% through late June, according to compensation consultancy Semler Brossy, up from 89.4% for all of 2025.

Special awards draw scrutiny.

Shareholders have been less supportive of the growing number of special compensation awards, Semler Brossy found.

“These awards, which are usually intended to be one-offs and exist outside of annual compensation programs, are a hot-button issue,” the firm found.

Among S&P 500 companies that disclosed special awards, Goldman Sachs paid CEO David Solomon $118.9 million last year, including a major retention award. About 71% of votes cast backed the package, well below the broader S&P 500 average.

“We’re very pleased with the strong supermajority this vote received,” Goldman Sachs spokesperson Tony Fratto said.

Real estate investment trust Welltower awarded CEO Shankh Mitra $821 million, intended to cover most of his compensation over the next decade. Only 19% of votes cast supported the package.

“Welltower’s board and compensation committee remain committed to engaging with shareholders to gather their feedback and understand their perspectives,” a spokesperson told Reuters.

The spokesperson added that Mitra would receive the full amount only if he met all performance targets.

(Disclaimer: This article is based on inputs from agencies. These do not represent the views of The Economic Times)

Shares of Accelerant Holdings surged Thursday after the specialty insurance platform reported second-quarter results that dramatically exceeded Wall Street expectations, with earnings coming in double what analysts had forecast and revenue beating estimates by more than 30%.

The stock traded at $19.53, up $5.93, or 43.53%, as of 1:01 p.m. Eastern time, extending gains from earlier in the session and marking one of the sharpest single-day moves in the company’s short history as a public company. Shares had closed at $13.61 the previous day before the earnings release, meaning Thursday’s rally has pushed the stock roughly 81% above its 52-week low of $10.77, set just two weeks earlier on July 31.

Accelerant reported second-quarter earnings that beat analyst expectations by 100%, alongside revenue that came in approximately 30.22% above consensus forecasts, according to market data. The company hosted its earnings call at 8 a.m. Eastern time Thursday to walk investors through the results in greater detail.

Accelerant operates what it describes as a data-driven risk exchange for commercial insurance, connecting specialized underwriters, known as Members, with third-party risk capital providers, while using artificial intelligence and proprietary data to support underwriting decisions. The company’s capital-light business model has become a central part of its investment case, with only about 9% of premiums retained on its own balance sheet and a growing share of exchange written premium placed with outside capital partners, a structure designed to generate durable free cash flow without requiring the company to hold significant underwriting risk itself.

The company’s full-year 2025 results, reported earlier this year, showed exchange written premiums up 35%, total revenue up 51%, and adjusted EBITDA up 149%, reflecting the scaling benefits of its capital-light platform model. More recent trailing figures have shown continued strength, with gross margins near 70% and substantial operating cash flow and free cash flow generation, even as the company’s bottom-line profitability has remained negative on a trailing basis, a pattern common among high-growth platform businesses still working to achieve full profitability at scale.

Despite the strong operational metrics, Accelerant’s first-quarter 2026 results showed a loss of 2.3 cents per share, a sharp reversal from a $3.27 per share profit in the first quarter of 2025, a swing driven primarily by non-operating, accounting-related factors rather than the company’s core underlying business performance.

Accelerant has continued to signal confidence in its long-term growth trajectory through corporate actions beyond its quarterly results. The company’s board approved a share repurchase program earlier this year authorizing up to $200 million in buybacks of Class A common shares, with the program running through the end of 2028. Accelerant also recently announced key leadership additions, naming Cliff Jenks as general counsel and corporate secretary and Ray Iardella as head of investor relations, moves aimed at strengthening the company’s corporate governance and its engagement with the investment community as a newly public company.

Accelerant went public in July 2025, and its stock has experienced significant volatility in the roughly 13 months since its debut. Shares fell sharply in late July of this year, tumbling from the mid-$14 range to a closing low near $11.20 by July 30, before beginning a steady recovery that carried the stock back into the mid-$13s heading into Thursday’s earnings release. Thursday’s post-earnings surge has now pushed shares well above where they traded before that late-July pullback, though the stock has traded with substantial volatility throughout its time as a public company, reflecting the market’s ongoing effort to properly value a fast-growing but not yet consistently profitable specialty insurance technology platform.

Institutional investors have shown growing interest in the stock in recent months. Utah-based Grandeur Peak Global Advisors initiated a new position in Accelerant following the company’s IPO, while Keenan Capital disclosed a new stake in the company in a filing earlier this year. Not all shareholder activity has pointed toward accumulation, however, with an entity called Badly Bent LLC disclosing plans to sell up to 80,000 shares of Accelerant Class A common stock on or after August 10, continuing a pattern of periodic share sales the entity has made over the preceding three months, according to regulatory filings.

Technical indicators following Thursday’s rally suggested the stock had moved into sharply overbought territory in the very short term, with the daily relative strength index reading near 77 and even higher readings on shorter intraday timeframes, levels that market analysts have said sometimes signal a risk of near-term pullback even amid a broader bullish fundamental backdrop. Even so, some analysts have pointed to Accelerant’s valuation, trading at roughly nine times projected 2026 enterprise value to EBITDA even after Thursday’s rally, as still reasonable relative to the scale of the company’s cash generation and growth trajectory.

With Thursday’s earnings beat now digested by the market, investors are likely to watch closely in the coming months for further confirmation that Accelerant’s rapid premium and revenue growth can continue translating into sustained free cash flow generation and an eventual path to consistent bottom-line profitability, key questions that will likely continue shaping sentiment toward the stock following its dramatic post-earnings rally.

Water companies have been given the green light to increase bills for customers by an extra £3.4bn in coming years to meet increased pressures on infrastructure and the environment.

Nearly a third of the extra funding provisionally approved for 13 water companies in England and Wales is earmarked for making sure water services are maintained.

Some of the rest will be used to meet rising demand from housebuilding and data centres and to address pollutants known as “forever chemicals”.

Prime Minister Andy Burnham said the proposal was “real money out of family budgets at a time when they are struggling with the cost of living”, and an environmental group described the decision as “an insult”.

Customers of five water companies – Severn Trent Water, Southern Water, Thames Water, Wessex Water, and South East Water – are facing additional bill rises over the next two years, on top of increases that were already announced in 2024.

The new increases will vary between firms.

Southern, for example, will charge £43 extra next year, while South Eastern will only charge £1 more in 2029. The increases will only come into effect if they are given final approval later this year.

The other eight water firms identified – Anglian Water, Dwr Cymru Welsh Water, Hafren Dyfrdwy, Northumbrian Water, Wouth West Water, United Utiliites, Yorkshire Water, SES Water – would recover their additional spending through customer bills after 2030.

Many consumers are angry at being asked to pay anything more against a backdrop of interruptions to supply sometimes lasting for days, and rivers, lakes and beaches too polluted to use safely.

But water companies argue that these problems can only be solved by boosting spending to replace pipes, build treatment plants and establish new reservoirs.

Climate change has also increased pressure on the water infrastructure by making heavy rains and heatwaves more frequent.

TAIPEI — Shares of Asustek Computer surged Thursday after the Taiwanese electronics maker reported second-quarter earnings that nearly doubled from a year earlier, extending a rally that has made the company one of the standout performers of Taiwan’s ongoing artificial intelligence-driven technology boom.

Asustek shares, traded on the Taiwan Stock Exchange under ticker 2357, climbed to 937.00 Taiwan dollars as of 1:30 p.m. local time, up 85.00 Taiwan dollars, or 9.98%, from the previous close of 852.00 Taiwan dollars. The move pushed the stock close to its 52-week high of 964.00 Taiwan dollars, a level reached earlier this year, and firmly within reach of a fresh record following Thursday’s earnings-driven rally.

Asustek reported second-quarter 2026 earnings per share of 25.64 Taiwan dollars, nearly double the 13.20 Taiwan dollars reported in the same period a year earlier. Revenue for the quarter came in at 257.7 billion Taiwan dollars, up 37% from the second quarter of 2025, while net income reached 19.0 billion Taiwan dollars, an increase of 94% year-over-year. The company’s profit margin expanded to 7.4%, up from 5.2% a year earlier, with the improvement driven primarily by the strength of revenue growth outpacing the rise in costs. Both headline figures topped analyst expectations, with revenue exceeding consensus estimates by 4.8% and earnings per share surpassing forecasts by roughly 65%.

The results extend a run of strong performance for Asustek that has been building for much of 2026. The company’s first-quarter results, reported earlier this year, showed record brand revenue of roughly 194.05 billion Taiwan dollars, or about $6.19 billion, a 44% increase from the prior year, driven by surging demand for AI servers alongside stable notebook computer shipments. That first-quarter report also showed net profit climbing 34% year-over-year to 4.82 billion Taiwan dollars, or roughly $160.9 million, underscoring a consistent pattern of accelerating profitability across the company’s recent quarterly results.

Asustek’s rapid growth has been anchored heavily in its expanding artificial intelligence server business, a segment that has grown from a relatively modest contributor to the company’s overall revenue into one now approaching a fifth of total sales, according to earlier company disclosures. The company has continued to emphasize strong order visibility and margin resilience in its guidance to investors, even as component shortages and rising input costs have weighed on parts of the broader global electronics manufacturing sector throughout the year.

Wall Street analysts have offered a mixed, evolving picture of the stock heading into Thursday’s results. JPMorgan analyst Albert Hung upgraded Asustek to neutral from underweight earlier this year, raising his price target to 750 Taiwan dollars from 525, even while remaining cautious on the outlook for consumer PC demand specifically. Morgan Stanley, by contrast, had previously downgraded the stock to underweight from equal weight, cutting its price target to 500 Taiwan dollars from 625, citing concerns about growing margin risk across hardware companies more broadly as component costs have climbed. Despite that split in analyst sentiment, the stock’s overall rating from covering analysts has remained a buy, with five analysts recommending purchase against a single sell rating heading into this week’s results.

Asustek’s share price performance has significantly outpaced broader regional benchmarks over the past year. According to data compiled by Stockopedia, the stock had outperformed the FTSE Developed Asia Pacific Index by more than 36 percentage points over the trailing six months even before Thursday’s earnings-driven gain, with shares trading nearly 29% above their 200-day moving average heading into the results. Simply Wall St separately noted that the stock has risen roughly 40% over the past year, even as some analysts have observed that the company’s earnings per share growth, averaging 45% annually over the past three years, has significantly outpaced the stock’s own price appreciation over the same period, suggesting the shares may not have fully caught up to the company’s underlying earnings growth.

Asustek’s rally forms part of a broader surge across Taiwan’s technology sector this year, fueled by explosive global investment in artificial intelligence infrastructure. Other major Taiwanese technology names, including chip foundry giant TSMC, have similarly posted strong gains throughout 2026 as global demand for AI-related hardware, from advanced semiconductors to servers and specialized computing equipment, has continued accelerating.

Looking ahead, Asustek’s next scheduled quarterly earnings report is due November 5, giving investors roughly three months to assess whether the strong order momentum and margin improvement seen in Thursday’s second-quarter results can be sustained into the back half of the year. With the stock now trading near its 52-week high following the earnings beat, market participants are likely to watch closely for any further signals on AI server order backlogs and pricing trends as the company works to build on what has already been one of its strongest years of growth in recent memory.

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