| HN Mirror

I just saw a headline yesterday based on a new study which said the average U.S. CEO's compensation is 399 times the average employee. So there's your number. A CEO taking zero would cover less than 400 employees. Also, keep in mind the vast majority of Satya's compensation is in long-term vesting stock options which can become worthless if the stock is lower in four years than it is this year. Also, due to how capital gains taxes work, Satya is going to hold his vested options for at least another year after they vest.

Plus, every sale of the company's stock by a key executive is immediately reported to the SEC and publicly available on the SEC and company's websites. Wall street watches this like a hawk. If any key exec unloads more than a few percent of their entire holdings at any one time, it will hurt the stock price pretty substantially. Effectively, it makes it so the CEO can't sell a lot their stock at once while they are CEO.

The big numbers you see for CEO compensation for this year are largely stock options that were granted years prior which vested this year. Almost all of Satya's compensation is performance-based instead of guaranteed. The company he leads must deliver sustained profitable growth over the long-term for his comp to be worth a lot. The fact it's worth a lot this year is almost entirely due to him already delivering on his commitments to shareholders in the past. Keep in mind that the average public company CEO is in the CEO job less than five years. Satya is in the minority that is succeeding. Due to the high visibility of the CEO role, the majority who don't succeed have a high likelihood of never earning significant compensation again.