Comparing pay for Microsoft's boss and the company's workers

Scroll down for a tall chart.

Last week, Microsoft eliminated 9,000 jobs—laying off 4% of its workforce (and a big chunk of its gaming team)—despite having reported nearly $26 billion in net income in the first three months of 2025.

Massive profits may not preclude a company from cutting jobs. Perhaps they know of some weakness to their business that necessitates eliminating the jobs of scores of experienced professionals.

It may nevertheless be instructive to check in on one available metric for how workers are doing at Microsoft vs. how well their top boss is doing.

The data in the chart below is pulled from Microsoft’s annual proxy filings, from 2018-2024. As required by the U.S. government, those filings include a comparison of the annual reported compensation for Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and the median compensation for Microsoft’s workers.

For both CEO and workers, the compensation figures include salary, bonuses and stock option awards that typically don’t vest—don’t become available to the person who was granted them—until some number of years later. The ultimate size of those stock awards is often tied to the achievement of specific targets and, of course, is also affected by how valuable Microsoft’s stock is.

The most recent compensation figures for Microsoft date back to mid-2024 and were reported by the company last fall.

• For Microsoft workers, the median annual compensation as of June 30, 2024 was $193,744.

• For Microsoft’s CEO, his compensation for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2024, was $79,106,183.

Here’s the compensation comparison in chart form, with the y-axis extended so you can see fluctuations in both the CEO line and the worker line.

The chart is 20,000 pixels tall, so prepare to do a lot of scrolling (some Game File readers already got some training in).

Some notes: For Nadella, the overwhelming majority of his compensation is tied to stock awards that are judged across a three-year period and can result in higher or lower amounts of stock based on how the company performs….

… In 2024, Nadella’s cash salary was $2.5 million; he was awarded a cash bonus of $10.6 million (tied to company performance) but requested a reduction of that bonus to $5.2 million due to the company’s cybersecurity failures; most of the rest of the $79 million was in stock awards to be fully calculated and paid in the future.

… An alternate method of calculating executive pay, called “Compensation Actually Paid,” (CAP) was first mandated by the U.S. government in late 2022, and shows Nadella’s 2024 compensation to be even higher: $171,304,590 (which would make this chart much taller; no CAP figures are provided for the median worker). The methodology for calculating CAP totals is disputed by companies, including Microsoft, which stated in its 2024 proxy that “These dollar amounts do not reflect the actual amounts of compensation earned by or paid to our Named Executives during the applicable year.” Unlike traditionally reported compensation figures, CAP calculates the most recent market value for unvested stock awards granted in the most recent year as well as changes to the value of stock granted in prior years. Amit Batish, a senior director at corporate data and analysis firm Equilar, told Game File that CAP offers a “look at the change in potential wealth over time” and “gives a more real-time picture of how an executive is being compensated.” Neither figure precisely captures the amount of cash and stock the executive actually obtains that year—including stock that has vested from prior years’ stock awards and had been subject to performance-based calculations. Those are considered “realized” gains. Microsoft says Nadella’s realized gains from vested stock in 2024 totaled $44,011,776.

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