He certainly isn’t as quirky or weird as Bill Gates. He’s far less obnoxious and loud than Steve Ballmer, but Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has proven himself to be the first two Microsoft CEOs equal in revenue and growth.
That might be selling him a little short, actually.
Nadella took office in February 2014, when the stock price was $36.36. Through the leadership of Nadella, in just under ten years, he’s increased it by 900%. A share of stock was $364.02 this week, a staggering performance for a chief executive who shows no signs of slowing down.
A key to his success has been his priority of diversifying the company and becoming a network and cloud computing leader. Because of that, he has increased Microsoft’s market cap to $2.59 trillion, trailing only Apple and its $3 trillion valuation.
Nadella has also been brilliant in acquisitions. He snatched up LinkedIn for $26 billion seven years ago and rocked the tech world last year with the $68.7 billion purchase of video game developer Activision Blizzard.
This year, he aggressively moved into the AI space by investing a minimum of $10 billion in OpenAI.
So, with all that success, he deserves to be compensated in a way that richly rewards him for all those wins. And yes, he has been. Fortune reports that his salary last year was $55 million, and according to Bloomberg, his total compensation since becoming CEO is more than $1 billion.
Nobody can say he doesn’t deserve every penny he’s earned, and you could argue that he might even be underpaid.
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