Microsoft CEO had a massive payday of $79.1 million in 2023, which is over a 50% increase compared to 2022.
Notably, CEO Satya Nadella even requested a cut in his salary due to the cybersecurity issues of the company.
BBC shared that without the cut, Nadella would've received $5 million more. Regardless, it's a whopping 63% of his 2022 salary despite several job cuts across all company divisions, including gaming.
However, an important part of Nadella's pay rise is the 16% increase in revenue of Microsoft for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2024.
Read More: CrowdStrike-Microsoft Outage Cost Delta Air Lines $500 Million After 4,000 Flight Cancellations
Microsoft CEO Salary Increase
The company's compensation committee also claimed that while Nadella acknowledged Microsoft's strong performance in a letter addressed to shareholders, he was still adamant about requesting a salary cut in his cash incentive.
Nadella personally accounted for several cyberattacks, including a significant data breach in 2023, which according to VCPost, affected email accounts of US government agencies and 25 organizations and led to distrust from authorities. Microsoft found that this was caused by Chinese hackers, but was called a "disinformation" by Beijing.
As for the global tech outage this year that affected Microsoft Windows PC globally, even airlines, the fiscal year at the time has already ended and has therefore not counted the millions of financial losses associated with it.
Now, the majority of the Microsoft CEO's earnings came from stock options.
Critics commented that while it's justifiable to increase Nadella's earnings due to the company's strong financial results, there is no need to receive such high compensation, especially since there is still pay inequality in the tech industry.
Satya Nadella is currently worth $1.4 billion, according to The Street, with critics calling his recent big pay out a part of his tiny compensation rather than his salary as CEO.
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