Microsoft executive pay
Microsoft filed its annual proxy statement yesterday, detailing information including the compensation of its top executives in its last fiscal year. As explained in this morning's story, the combined bonus and salary for Bill Gates reached $1 million for the first time. Steve Ballmer's compensation continues to be the same as Gates'. Also surpassing that mark were the other named executives, Kevin Johnson, Jeff Raikes and Jim Allchin, each of whom was named a divisional president as part of Microsoft's restructuring last week.
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Click image for chart showing Microsoft executive salary and cash bonus for past four years. |
That doesn't include sizable stock awards given to those three executives, also disclosed in the proxy and detailed below. (Gates and Ballmer, who already own large portions of the company, don't receive stock.) Salary information for the fourth divisional president, Robbie Bach, wasn't disclosed. As noted in this related filing, the company has since boosted the underlying salary for each of the five executives.
Despite the overall compensation increases, Microsoft's proxy cites research asserting that its top executives are still paid less than others at comparable companies. Here's the passage that addresses that issue:
The comparison group includes approximately 15 leading information technology companies and large market capitalization U.S. companies with whom Microsoft competes for executive talent. The median CEO salary and bonus for the comparison group were $1.065 million in base salary and $2.385 million in bonus.
As you can tell from the accompanying chart, the increases for the executives came primarily through their bonuses, with smaller increases in their underlying salaries. That doesn't include the stock awards for the three named divisional presidents. Based on yesterday's closing stock price, Johnson's fiscal 2005 stock award was worth $17.87 million, while Allchin's and Raikes' were worth $22.25 million each.
Posted by Todd Bishop at September 29, 2005 07:49 AM
