Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s complete pay bundle for fiscal 2025 has been confirmed, and the chief earned a complete of $96.5 million for the 12 months. That’s up 22% from the earlier 12 months and represents his highest-ever annual pay. It is a large a number of over what the median Microsoft employee makes, with the median employee taking dwelling round $200,000.
The chief’s pay particulars are coming to mild as the corporate faces scrutiny over its latest Xbox selections, together with layoffs, sport cancellations, studio closures, value hikes, and growing profit-margin mandates. The corporate as an entire has confronted ongoing criticism as effectively on account of its slate of mass layoffs, partnership with Israel, and investments in AI, amongst different issues.
Nadella is paid a $2.5 million wage, a determine that is been the identical since 2019. Nearly all of his pay for fiscal 2025 got here from inventory awards, making up $84.2 million (87%) of his complete pay. Microsoft revealed all of this as a part of a regulatory submitting disclosed this week, as reported by The Seattle Occasions.
Nadella additionally makes cash from an annual money bonus–for this newest fiscal 12 months, Nadella received paid a bonus of $9.56 million. The bonus he received final year–$5.2 million–was hundreds of thousands lower than this 12 months. That is as a result of he requested a decrease money bonus for 2024 due partially to cyberattacks towards Microsoft.
The median pay for a Microsoft worker, excluding Nadella’s pay, rose in fiscal 2025 to $200,972, up from $193,744. On the similar time, the delta between Nadella’s pay and the median Microsoft wage is rising, reaching 480-to-1 for fiscal 2025–that’s up from 250-to-1 in 2023.
The regulatory submitting revealing Nadella’s newest pay included a memo from Microsoft’s board of administrators saying the CEO’s efforts to push on synthetic intelligence helped Microsoft’s fortunes general within the newest fiscal 12 months. “His management staff have positioned Microsoft as a transparent synthetic intelligence chief for this generational know-how shift,” the board stated.
Microsoft reached a $4 trillion market cap this 12 months and the corporate’s inventory additionally reached an all-time excessive of greater than $535 earlier this 12 months. Microsoft is the No. 2 most dear firm on this planet proper now, solely trailing Nvidia.
Nadella grew to become CEO of Microsoft in 2014, taking up for Steve Ballmer. He’s simply the third CEO of Microsoft, following Invoice Gates and Ballmer. Since Nadella took over as CEO, Microsoft’s inventory value has risen from about $36 in 2014 to greater than $520 in the present day, a rise of greater than 1,300%.
Lately, Microsoft made headlines once more over a report that stated CFO Amy Hood has applied a new profit-margin mandate for Xbox of 30%, which is effectively above business requirements. Many have theorized that this reported mandate has contributed to among the selections Microsoft has made in latest instances, together with bringing its first-party video games to rival platforms, elevating costs on consoles and Sport Cross, investing in automation applied sciences with AI, canceling video games, closing studios, and shedding staff.
Sources informed Bloomberg that Microsoft will look to concentrate on producing titles which might be “low-cost to make” or extra more likely to generate income versus “riskier bets.”
Microsoft will publish its subsequent earnings report on October 29, at which period the corporate’s monetary fortunes for the newest quarter can be revealed.
