Microsoft’s Nadella gets $84m pay package

REDMOND, Washington: Microsoft has given its new CEO Satya Nadella a pay package worth $84.3 million, most of it in the form of long-term stock awards.
A regulatory document filed Monday shows Nadella got a salary for the fiscal year that ended June 30 of $918,917 and a $3.6 million bonus.
He also was given stock awards worth nearly $79.8 million but most of the payments will be made over several years.
Microsoft said Nadella’s actual compensation for the company’s fiscal year 2014 is worth $11.6 million after excluding the long-term stock awards and a $13.5 million one-time retention award he received before his promotion to CEO.
Nadella was named CEO in February and is only the third chief executive in the company’s history.
The Redmond, Washington-based company said in the regulatory filing that it had to change its pay structure because its former CEOs, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, were not given stock awards. That was because they were already among Microsoft’s largest shareholders.
Nadella’s pay package includes a long-term performance-based stock award valued at $59.2 million. Nadella won’t receive any of that until 2019 and it will depend on the performance Microsoft’s stock relative to other companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 index.
The Microsoft CEO made headlines earlier this month with remarks he made at a women-in-computing conference, where he suggested that women don’t need to ask for raises and should just trust that the system will pay them what they’re worth. The comment drew immediate criticism, although Nadella later said he was repeating advice that he’d been given in his own career.
He apologized and later announced in a companywide memo that all Microsoft Corp. workers will receive expanded training on how to foster an inclusive culture.