The winner takes it all. Satya Nadella, who has been appointed as CEO of Microsoft, will earn $4.8 million in the current financial year.

While Nadella gets an annual salary of $1.2 million, he will get three times ($3.6 million) more as a cash award. This will go up to $18 million next year as he becomes eligible for stock awards.

These numbers are small when the performance-linked stock awards that will come his way in the next few years are factored in. Nadella has been taken on the company’s board.

Formal offering The company has made a formal offering to the incumbent CEO, giving a detailed break-up of the compensation.

In a filing to US market regulator Securities and Exchange Commission, the company said that Nadella would be eligible for an annual stock award worth $13.20 million under the company’s Executive Incentive Programme.

This, however, is not all. He will get much more if the company’s stock performs better. He will be granted long-term performance stock awards. These are based on complex math that factors in the performance of the stock at the completion of a five-year period (beginning 2019, 2020 and 2021.

The allotment of long-term performance stock will, however, begin to accrue from this year itself.

Pat from Bill Gates Bill Gates, in a statement sent to the SEC, said: “During this time of transformation, there is no better person to lead Microsoft than Satya Nadella. He is a proven leader with hard-core engineering skills, business vision and the ability to bring people together.”

Microsoft said Nadella had led major strategy and technical shifts across a portfolio of products and services.

Most notable among are the company's move to the cloud and the development of one of the largest cloud infrastructures in the world, supporting Bing, Xbox and Office.

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