back to article Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is worth 154 median minions

It has been a bumper year for Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, whose compensation soared to $25.8m in fiscal 2018. Quite a bit more than the median salary of the rest of the company, which hovered at an admittedly none-too-shabby $167,689. The figures (PDF), which have been submitted to the US Securities and Exchange Commission in …

  1. Teiwaz

    Why are Politicians and CEOs like Satya.....

    Always demonstrating the size of their fish* with their hands when photo'd giving speeches.

    Maybe once, after spin and PR coaches came in it was 'one simple trick' body language to emphasise points and be an advantage for the odd person to do now and again, now it just looks like disjointed mime, 'the fish that got away was this big', 'I once ate a sandwich as big as my head' or possibly worse, 'huuuuge, tracts of land' gestures.

    Wish they'd pack it in....

    1. Will 28

      Re: Why are Politicians and CEOs like Satya.....

      Looks a bit menacing to me tbh. Like he's trying to go all "Game of Thrones" Mountain style on an imaginary Steve Ballmer's head.

  2. Scott 29

    This conflates compensation with individual employee value.

  3. NoneSuch Silver badge
    Coffee/keyboard

    Can we start FundMe pages for them? 14 and 25 mil respectively does not go far these days. Must be hard to make ends meet.

  4. Daniel von Asmuth
    Boffin

    1 Nadella = 154 µserfs

    It was computed by Excel, therefore it must be true.

  5. adnim

    median, shmedian.

    Of 100 on the payroll, 99% earn $1 a year and one person earns $1million.

    What is the median?

    I am sure 100% of the 99% earning a dollar would say the median is misleading fuckin' bollocks.

    I wonder what is the average pay of the 90% lowest paid at MS is.

    1. M Lafferty

      Re: median, shmedian.

      In your example the median is $1. It is the "middle value" not the mean.

      1. Waseem Alkurdi
        Trollface

        Re: median, shmedian.

        Vivid memories of Grade 4 mathematics. And I still confuse the damned four (mean/median/mode/range)!

    2. This post has been deleted by its author

    3. katrinab Silver badge
      Boffin

      Re: median, shmedian.

      The median is $1 - list the salaries in ascending order and take the one half-way down the list.

      The arithmetic mean is $10,000.99 - add them all together and divide by the number of items you added together.

      The geometric mean is $1.49 - multiply them all together and take the 100th root

      The harmonic mean is $1.01 - take the arithmetic mean of the reciprocals and find the reciprocal of that.

      We usually use median for salaries because it is the least impacted by small outliers at the top.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I'm sure all that money will trickle down, that's how it works right?

    I read the other day somewhere a nice little quote, those earning 700 per hour have got the people earning 25 per hour to blame those earning 8 per hour. It's genius.

  7. Waseem Alkurdi

    With the pay-check this guy's making ...

    ... I absolutely have no idea why I'm studying medicine.

    His base salary is a paltry $1.5m, which crept up a mere $50,000 from last year's pay packet.

    Yeah, the pittance he earns is what a doctor makes in a whole lifetime, or even worse, what an average public-sector employee (loosely speaking) makes in a baker's dozen lifetimes.

    1. 2Nick3
      Joke

      Re: With the pay-check this guy's making ...

      $1.5m / 40 years (working lifetime) = $37,500/year. That's only 20% more than a $15/hour minimum wage would come out to ($31,200).

      "... I absolutely have no idea why I'm studying medicine."

      Probably better than studying mathematics...

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: With the pay-check this guy's making ...

      You'd think he could afford to buy some decent clothes.

    3. DropBear

      Re: With the pay-check this guy's making ...

      "I absolutely have no idea why I'm studying medicine."

      ...when you could be studying IT instead and end up working for less than €10000. Yes, per year. Yes, within the EU. Yes, it's still considerably more than the hoi polloi's loot. Dreaming about what it would have been like being a proper human being like a lawyer* or a doctor instead.

      * Okay, fine, semantics; they clearly aren't human by any other definition.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    You keep using that word...

    Can people please stop using the words "worth" or "earned" to describe how much CEOs and others of their ilk pay themselves and each other?

    1. FozzyBear

      Re: You keep using that word...

      Couldn't agree More.

      Raked in, Gouged,siphoned, extorted, received by Deception. are much better

    2. Nolveys
      Trollface

      Re: You keep using that word...

      Can people please stop using the words "worth" or "earned" to describe how much CEOs and others of their ilk pay themselves and each other?

      But SatNad did such a good job on Windows 10.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    UK Unis

    The public sector has the same disease but, still, not quite so wide.

    I am getting a bit more than the average and our Provost is earning £430k which is a bit over ten of me.

    AC because I haven't jacked it in yet.

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I dont have to look at the CEO to feel small, the last few meetings ive been in (re a new itsm system) I was worst paid by a mile. The nearset guy on 8k more , the rest on about 20k more.

    It's cos i'd be the one developing and running the system , so obviously thats not worth much...

  11. Claptrap314 Silver badge

    Socialist rhetoric

    is socialist rhetoric. Median income is a ridiculous metric. How many grounds keepers in that figure? (Hint: American tax law makes it practically illegal to employ grounds keepers in the same company as software engineers.) Guards? Cafeteria workers? Janitors? CEOs?

    Yep, in the US, my understanding is that executives at the major companies in fact work for their own private S-Corps, which then contracts them out to the company they are an officer of.

    In fact, a large business is a sprawling enterprise requiring a span of job requirements that is truly mind boggling. For various regulatory and tax reasons, the set of people who are actual employees of a given company is not at all representative of the people whose employment is actually tied to the enterprise.

    Moreover, there is no theory beside the free market that can consistently provide a "just" salary across even modestly different jobs.

    Unfortunately, a pure free market is almost as hard to find as a pure socialist one--and for the same reason. People are assholes. So executives' primary source of remuneration is the skill with which they weasel around what few barriers to them just writing checks to themselves that exist.

    The options are to do nothing (except perhaps gripe on some semi-anonymous websites), lobby for more regulation (which has consistently been singularly ineffective), or to engage in direct actions (strikes and/or revolution). The problem is that history has shown that while the former are ineffective, the latter are positively destructive.

    Piss people off enough, and they will cut off their nose to spite your face. Short of that, however, it's a pretty bleak picture.

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon

Other stories you might like