Living in the COVID World ... and Beyond #87: Recent Financial Facts

Here are some important recent financial facts:

1.        In 2025, Elon Musk’s Tesla compensation package was $158billion.   That is billion, not million.   For comparison, if you added up the 2025 compensation of all the other Fortune 500 CEO’s combined and multiplied that number by 14, it would equal Musk’s  2025 compensation.   Musk’s compensation was over 41 times Tesla’s 2025 net income. 

2.        According to the MIT Living Wage Calculator, single adults in America need to earn at least $25 an hour to afford basic essentials. Today, about 45-50% of the country—that is, 66 million Americans—earn less than that.

3.        The top 1% of the wealth distribution captured more than half of all fossil fuel profits during the 2021–22 supply shocks. The bottom half of Americans received just 1%. 

4.        The latest Banking on Climate Chaos report shows the 10 largest US megabanks plowed $314.4 billion into fossil fuels in 2025 – a 7.5% increase from the previous year and 32% of the world’s total.   The largest US megabanks disproportionately use your deposits to finance fossil fuels.

JPMorgan Chase is again the world’s No. 1 financer of fossil fuels, sending $58.2 billion to oil and gas projects in 2025, a 12.6% increase from 2024.

Citibank is second in the world, with $45.3 billion in financing of fossil fuels.

Two medium-sized banks are notable for high fossil fuel financing – Truist Financial at $20.9 billion, and PNC Financial Services at $18.4 billion.

Other US megabanks heavily financing fossil fuels include Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, US Bank, and Capital One. Every one of these banks increased funding to fossil fuels in 2025.

5.        Donald Trump frequently points to the stock market as proof of a strong economy. Recently, Trump even touted his own market gains, telling reporters, “You know why I’m profiting? Because the stock market’s going up, everybody’s profiting.”  But not everybody is sharing in the market’s upside. According to the latest Federal Reserve data, the top 1 percent of Americans own about 50 percent of all corporate equities and mutual fund shares, while the bottom 90 percent collectively hold just 12.7 percent of that wealth. At the same time, those same 90 percent of households carry roughly three-quarters of the nation’s debt.