Summary
Microsoft’slast fiscal year was pretty rough. Putting aside all the problems thatXboxhas been facing recently (of which there are many), Microsoft itself has made headlines multiple times over the past couple of years for mass layoffs, with the most recent example in January earlier this year. It was reported thata whopping 1,900 people in the company’s gaming division lost their jobs that month.
Couple that with somepretty serious cybersecurity issues in July last year, and you’d assume that the man in charge of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, wouldn’t be in line for extra compensation this year. However, that does appear to be the case,as a proxy filingspottedby NBC earlier this week(thanks IGN) has revealed that Nadella’s compensation for the fiscal year 2024 rose to just over $79.1 million.
Microsoft CEO Gets $30 Million Pay Increase Despite Year Of Layoffs
In the filing, it’s revealed that Nadella received $2.5 million as a base salary, $71.24 million in stock awards, $5.2 million in non-equity incentive plan compensation, and other types of compensation making up the rest of that giant figure. To put this into perspective, Nadella earned $48.5 million for fiscal year 2023, and the vast majority of Nadella’s pay increase this year came from a $32 million increase in stock awards.
The filing also notes that the ratio of the annual total of Satya Nadella’s compensation to the annual total compensation of the median employee at Microsoft was 408 to 1.
It’s also worth noting that this filing explains that Nadella personally requested a pay cut to the “cash incentive” portion of his pay, as an attempt to take accountability for the aforementioned cybersecurity issues last year. You would hope that he’d also take responsibility for the almost 2,000 Microsoft employees that were let go at the start of the year, but clearly, that wasn’t much of an issue for Nadella.
This is also on top ofa ten percent pay increase that Nadella received at the beginning of 2023, which was worse at the time as it was announcedin the midst of Microsoft cutting 10,000 jobs across the company. Even then, that pales in comparison to the 63 percent pay increase that he’s received this time around, and you have to wonder how high that number’s going to increase next year, even if Microsoft has an absolutely torrid time once again.
Microsoft
Microsoft is an American multinational conglomerate responsible for products such as Windows, Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer and Edge, and the Xbox series of home consoles.
