Microsoft has lost an awful lot of goodwill in recent times. Over the last two years, it has , , and and its consoles multiple times. It seems that Microsoft, in light of this, has had a good fiscal year, and that is making its way up to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.
As reported by , Nadella is being paid $96.5 million for 2025, which is a $17.4 million bump from last year. To put that $96.5 million figure into context, with the highest tier of Xbox Game Pass now costing $30 a month, this could pay for 3.216 million months of the game streaming service, or 268,055 years.
In the proxy statement, it details that Nadella may acquire 265,106 shares via vesting (effectively earning shares through working at the company), and this amount of shares is being valued at $110 million. If Nadella is fired without cause, he is entitled to $183 million. If he chooses to retire, he would, instead, make $145 million.
Though the specific figure isn't given, estimates place the average Microsoft employee's salary at somewhere between and , which means Nadella's retirement compensation equates to the pay of almost 1,000 employees in a year for Microsoft.
Microsoft currently , and has expected such since 2023. The recent launch of the seems to have gone well, if stock shortages are anything to go by, but the push for Xbox Game Pass on non-Xbox devices and build-up to the next Xbox console will shape the company's strategy going forward. The disparity between the average employee's wage and the CEO's wage is so [[link]] on the nose it could make its way into , Xbox's upcoming [[link]] late-stage capitalist RPG.
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