Despite mass layoffs and a previous pay cut, Microsoft's CEO is taking home nearly $100 million this year

Microsoft has lost an awful lot of goodwill in recent times. Over the last two years, it has laid off over 10,000 workers, closed iconic studios like Arkane Austin and Tango Gameworks, and raised the prices of Xbox Game Pass 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 CNBC, 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.

268,055 years ago, Homo neanderthalensis roamed the earth, and 268,055 years from now, Nvidia is likely going to be the first company to be worth $1 quintillion, probably.

Nadella took a 50% pay cut willingly due to major cyberattacks against Microsoft (via Techspot), but his huge payout is not from traditional pay. Instead, it comes from $84.245 million in stock awards and $9.55 million in an incentive scheme. Other forms of compensation make up a comparably measly $196,294, totalling a grand sum of $96.496 million for 2025.

Microsoft filed a proxy statement for its 2025 financials, detailing Nadella's performance and entitlements, as well as total pay. In this, the filing splits into two sections where Nadella is being monitored for a compensation increase: financial results and operational performance results. Nadella reportedly achieved results of 140% in security, 160% in product, customers and stakeholders, then 155% in culture.

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 $130k and $170k, which means Nadella's retirement compensation equates to the pay of almost 1,000 employees in a year for Microsoft.

Microsoft currently expects the Xbox division to achieve 30% profit margins, and has expected such since 2023. The recent launch of the Asus ROG Xbox Ally X 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 on the nose it could make its way into The Outer Worlds 2, Xbox's upcoming late-stage capitalist RPG.

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