The CEO of Amazon, Andy Jassy sits at the top of the e-commerce giant’s ladder but doesn’t take home the largest slice of the moolah. In his 2022 letter to Amazon shareholders, Jassy outlined his plans for markets for the big tech company could dominate, reiterated employees to return to the office, and also revealed Amazon’s perennial investments in AI.
The company’s proxy financial statement of the preceding year entailed a startling revelation – Andy Jassy’s salary cut of about 99 percent.
Jassy’s peers in big tech such as Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, Apple’s Tim Cook, and even Amazon founder Jeff Bezos compensation were stratospheric in contrast to the Amazon CEO’s salary in 2022.
Struggling with losses and a bitter slowdown in sales, Amazon’s financial performance of 2021-22 could be epitomized as “one of the worst financial years in history”. Amid high inflation and a straitened pot of budgets, Jassy had to orchestrate the cynical act of massive layoffs to prune outlays.
How Much Does Amazon CEO Andy Jassy Earn?
The document, released Thursday divulged that CEO Jassy’s base salary ensconced at $175,000 in 2021, the same figure continuing since 2020.
Surprisingly, Jassy’s base pay had risen by 80 percent to $317,500 in 2022, analogous to AWS’s CEO Adam Selipsky, even though the Amazon CEO’s salary reduction had affected his total compensation.
Andy Jassy’s salary cut was also denotative of speculations that the Amazon CEO had earned lesser than its former CEO and founder Jeff Bezos, who may be gifting millions of dollars worth of Amazon stock to charitable endowments but earned $1.6 million as the company’s executive chairman.
As the pioneer who transformed Amazon from a virtual bookstore in 1994 into the behemoth today, Bezos is compensated more than $1.5 million a year by Amazon.
“The quantum of the reported security expenses for Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is reasonable, by virtue of his low salary and the fact that he has never been awarded any stock-based compensation.”
Bezos is the majority shareholder in the company, with a chunk of 10 percent of Amazon shares worth $90 billion, despite gifting vast swaths of stock, such as his latest generosity of 1.9 million shares worth $600 million to undisclosed recipients.
How Much Did Andy Jassy Make In 2022?
The financial proxy was unequivocal of Andy Jassy’s 2022 pay plunging with the seven-figure package of $1,298,723, which was made up of base compensation of $317,500 and the rest of the $981,223 in 401(k) payments and additional security costs.
According to Fortune, Jassy unearthed $212 million in stock in 2021 from the stock he had vested over a decade. And in 2022, the Amazon CEO’s salary reduction was indicative of a 99 percent drop.
Albeit Andy Jassy’s salary cut has stumped the tech industry, which is already sailing on the waters of woes, as per a report of Insider, the Amazon CEO has vested $31.9 million in 2022 and is expected to invest $18.9 million in 2023.
Why Did Andy Jassy Take A Pay Cut?
While Amazon’s Compensation Committee typically grants periodic equity or restricted stock unit awards to executive officers in even-numbered years, the regulatory proxy filing noted that CEO Jassy had been bestowed with no such award in 2022.
But, the Amazon CEO’s 2021’s compensation package of $212 million was inclusive of a large stock award.
The company’s response to why Jassy took a pay cut, mentioned that this equity is to be vested over 10 years and is intended to symbolize most of Jassy’s compensation for the further years. Jassy’s $31.9 million stock vesting in 2022 is also being considered as a part of the compensation.
However, by the dint of the fluctuating plunge in Amazon’s stock price, Andy Jassy’s pay cut seems obvious because the same stock grant is now worth less than half of the value it held at the end of 2022.
