From Kolkata to the World's 2nd Highest-Paid CEO: Shankh Mitra's Pay is Over 2 Crore Times an Average Indian Salary

There's a new name sitting at number two on the list of the world's best-paid company bosses, and he has Indian roots. Shankh Mitra, who runs the American healthcare-property giant Welltower, earned $821 million in 2025. That puts him second only to Elon Musk, whose pay from Tesla this year was so enormous, $158 billion, that it alone added up to more than every other CEO on the list combined, according to figures reported by The Wall Street Journal using data from MyLogIQ.

Breaking down Mitra's pay packet

Convert it to rupees and Mitra's earnings work out to somewhere around Rs 7,000 crore for the year. Almost none of it was a regular paycheck. Roughly 99 out of every 100 rupees of that figure came in the form of company shares, not cash. The single biggest piece was a stock grant handed to him in October, originally worth close to $789 million on paper. By the time the year wrapped up, rising share prices had pushed the value of that grant past the $1 billion mark.

The reason his stock is worth so much comes down to how well Welltower performed. The company, which owns and operates senior living and healthcare facilities across the US, saw its share price climb by roughly half its value over the year, a strong run that directly fed into Mitra's pay.

Other big earners on the list

He isn't the only executive of Indian origin to make headlines this year. Nikesh Arora, who heads the cybersecurity company Palo Alto Networks, landed in eighth place with a $100 million package. Further down the pecking order sat some familiar Wall Street names. Goldman Sachs chief David Solomon brought home close to $119 million, the highest figure among major bank bosses this year. Warner Bros. Discovery's David Zaslav pulled in $165 million. Meanwhile, household names like Disney's Bob Iger and JPMorgan's Jamie Dimon earned far less by comparison, $46 million and $43 million respectively, numbers that would have made headlines in any other year but barely register next to Mitra's total.

What's driving all this is a shift in how companies pay their top executives. Cash salaries have become almost an afterthought at this level. Instead, boards are increasingly betting big on stock, tying enormous award packages to ambitious performance goals. When a company's stock takes off the way Tesla's or Welltower's did this year, those paper awards can balloon into sums that dwarf anything a fixed salary could ever produce. The Journal's tracking shows more American CEOs cleared the $100 million mark in 2025 than in any year since 2021.

A pattern that keeps repeating itself

This kind of jump to the top isn't new. In past years, it's typically been founders or long-serving executives at fast-growing tech and EV companies who've claimed similar headlines, almost always through a single oversized stock award rather than steady annual pay. What makes this year different is just how lopsided the gap at the very top has become. Musk's number was large enough to function in a category of its own, and even Mitra's genuinely historic total still landed a clear second, nowhere near close enough to challenge it.

One caveat worth keeping in mind: figures like these reflect the value of stock awards at the point they're granted or counted, not money that's necessarily been sold or banked. So while the number is real on paper, it isn't quite the same as having that amount sitting in a bank account.

What this number actually means next to an Indian salary

Numbers this large are hard to picture, so it helps to set them against something familiar. According to India's own labour ministry data from the latest Periodic Labour Force Survey, the average male salaried worker in India earned about Rs 24,217 a month in 2025, while women earned roughly Rs 18,353 a month. Annually, that comes to somewhere close to Rs 2.9 lakh for men.

Run the maths, and a worker on that average salary would need well over two crore years of work to match what Mitra made in twelve months. Even stretch the comparison to a well-paid city professional earning around Rs 9 lakh a year, comfortably above the national average, and the gap barely narrows. That worker would still be looking at roughly eight lakh years of work to catch up to Mitra's single year of earnings.

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