Satya Nadella's total pay for Microsoft's 2026 financial year was $90.6m, about 6 per cent less than the year before, according to the company's proxy filing.
The package comprised a base salary of $2.5m, stock awards of $77.6m, non-equity incentive pay of $10.3m and $259,203 of other compensation.
The fall was not a verdict on performance. The Register reports that stock awards vest at different rates from year to year and that the latest award was lower, while Nadella met his financial and operational targets.
Those targets were met with room to spare. Revenue rose 18 per cent to $331.8bn and operating profit rose 18 per cent to $155.237bn. Cloud revenue was up 27 per cent at $214.4bn.
Revenue and operating income together accounted for 70 per cent of the chief executive's goals, with security, strategic transformation and culture making up the rest.
Behind those figures sits a year of expansion. Microsoft added 88 datacentres and reached 30 million paid Copilot seats. GitHub ended the period with 225 million users, 50 million of whom used Copilot.
Colleagues fared better. Chief financial officer Amy Hood's pay rose to $33.7m from $29.5m, in a year in which she oversaw $43.8bn returned to shareholders. Judson Althoff received $33.4m, Brad Smith $33m and Takeshi Numoto $15.7m.
The filing also sets the chief executive's package against the workforce: it is equivalent to the average pay of 420 Microsoft employees, the average being $215,057.
Shareholders vote on executive compensation at the annual meeting on 8 December. Last year, 91 per cent of them approved it.
Taken together, the filing offers one clean data point, and this newspaper intends to extrapolate from it.
In the year under review, revenue moved by plus 18 per cent, operating profit by plus 18 per cent and chief executive pay by minus 6 per cent. Three variables, one direction each, one of them pointing the other way.
Our analysts have derived the exchange rate those three numbers imply. Every 18 points of revenue growth costs the chief executive six points of pay. On that basis, the quickest route back to last year's package is a contraction.
The Department of Unnecessary Research has run the arithmetic in the other direction and reports that it is worse. To recover the missing 6 per cent, Microsoft would need revenue growth of minus 18 per cent, which on a base of $331.8bn means finding roughly $60bn of business to stop doing.
The remuneration committee will not put it in those terms, and it has its answer ready: the targets were met, and an earlier stock award simply vested at a different rate. That answer accounts for the entire 6 per cent.
It is also the only component of the package that no target measures. The targets were met in full. The one measure on which the year disappointed is the one that pays him.