Tragic news: despite steering Electronic Arts as CEO since 2013, Andrew Wilson hasn't had a pay rise in the last three years. He's scraping by on the same $1.3 million annual salary he's had since fiscal year (FY) 2023 (when it was bumped up from the $1.29 million he earned as salary in FY2022).
Times are tough. Still, hopefully Wilson can console himself with the other $29,200,000 he's netted in his position over the last fiscal year. Stagnant salary aside, Wilson has—per EA's 2025 Proxy Statement (via Game Developer)—earned $25.7 million in stock awards, $2.8 million in executive bonuses, and a $678,000 garnish from "All other compensation," namely $1.2k in insurance premiums paid on his behalf, $10.3k in 401(K) matching contributions, and $667k in "other," which is almost entirely derived from EA's $664k contribution to Wilson's "personal security benefits," based on an independent threat assessment.
In other news, I've resolved to never feel bad about expensing lunch on a business trip ever again.
In total, Wilson has pulled $5 million more in compensation in FY2025 than he did in FY2024, and $10 million more than he did in FY2023. In fairness, stock awards aren't necessarily the same thing as cold, hard cash, and he couldn't spend that half-a-mil EA is dropping on his bodyguards elsewhere if he wanted (at least, not without doing some very white-collar crime), but it's still more money in the span of a year than I—and chances are, you—will ever see in a lifetime. Unless EA makes me CEO. My calendar's open, EA.
All the more galling: while Wilson's compensation has shot up by $10 million in the last two fiscal years, comparing FY2025's proxy statement against those of previous years reveals that the earnings of EA's "median employee"—full time, part-time, regular, and temporary, all taken together—has declined in that time.
In FY2023, the annual total compensation of yer median EA employee was $129,851. FY2024? Actually a bit higher: $148,704. But in the last fiscal year that's cratered to $117,302, the lowest it's been since FY2022 (when it was $115,569).
As a ratio, that means Wilson earned 260 to 1, or 26,000%, what EA's median employee earned in FY2025, up from 170 to 1 in FY2024. Hey, for comparison, the Economic Policy Institute says that CEOs in general, not just the games industry, made 399 times what their employees did in 2021 (it was 20 to 1 in the '60s, by the by), so maybe Wilson is barely scraping by in his social circles.
But seeing Wilson's overall compensation shoot up by $10 million while his own staff are getting paid less in real terms? That's a bitter pill to swallow, made all the more bitter by what a rotten time this is for the games industry, as layoff after layoff after layoff continues to batter the devs who make the games we love while execs never seem to face any consequences at all. If anything, they reap the rewards.
At root, the problem isn't Wilson or EA; they're just an obvious example of it. The problem is a system which prioritises shareholder profit and executive compensation—which have all long-since spiralled up to absurd amounts that no one could really ever spend in a lifetime—over the health and happiness of the people doing the real work on the ground. How does that get fixed? Probably not in the final paragraph of this article, but it's frustrating to see it play out again. And again. And again.
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