Costs
Part of How to read executive pay filings and what they can and cannot show about net worth
Why an executive net worth comparison fails on pay filings
An executive net worth comparison cannot be built from proxy filings. Here are five named executives' disclosed pay and shareholdings, side by side.
The disclosed pay and shareholdings of five named US executives sit side by side below, each figure tied to the proxy statement it came from. No filing yields a wealth total, so an executive net worth comparison cannot be assembled from these documents; what they do carry is one year of pay and a count of shares beneficially owned. The fiscal years do not line up, so read the year before the dollar.
What to take away
- Every figure below comes from a proxy statement or a Form 4, not from an estimate.
- Reported pay is one year of flow. Shares beneficially owned are a stock, priced on a date you choose.
- A reported total adds base salary, bonus, grant-date equity value and perquisites.
- Each row covers its own fiscal year, so cross-row comparisons are rough at best.
- Nothing in these documents produces a net worth figure, and none of them claims to.
The comparison table, row by row
Pay and ownership come from the same document, so the pay year and the ownership record date match.
[figure 1]
Executive Pay and Holdings
Executive
- Tim Cook
- $74.6M
- Satya Nadella
- $79.1M
- Sundar Pichai
- $8.8M
- Jamie Dimon
- $36M
- Lisa Su
- $30.4M
Reported total compensation
- Tim Cook
- 3.3M shares
- Satya Nadella
- Under 1M
- Sundar Pichai
- Under 1M
- Jamie Dimon
- Several million
- Lisa Su
- Under 1M
Shares beneficially owned
- Tim Cook
- Satya Nadella
- Sundar Pichai
- Jamie Dimon
- Lisa Su
Company
- Tim Cook
- Apple
- Satya Nadella
- Microsoft
- Sundar Pichai
- Alphabet
- Jamie Dimon
- JPMorgan Chase
- Lisa Su
- AMD
Reported total compensation
- Tim Cook
- About $74.6 million
- Satya Nadella
- About $79.1 million
- Sundar Pichai
- About $8.8 million
- Jamie Dimon
- About $36 million
- Lisa Su
- About $30.4 million
Shares beneficially owned
- Tim Cook
- Roughly 3.3 million
- Satya Nadella
- Under 1 million
- Sundar Pichai
- Under 1 million
- Jamie Dimon
- Several million, including unvested awards
- Lisa Su
- Under 1 million
Fiscal year for pay
- Tim Cook
- Fiscal 2023, ended September 2023
- Satya Nadella
- Fiscal 2024, ended June 2024
- Sundar Pichai
- Calendar 2023
- Jamie Dimon
- Calendar 2023
- Lisa Su
- Calendar 2023
Source
- Tim Cook
- Apple DEF 14A, filed January 2024
- Satya Nadella
- Microsoft DEF 14A, filed October 2024
- Sundar Pichai
- Alphabet DEF 14A, filed April 2024
- Jamie Dimon
- JPMorgan Chase DEF 14A, filed April 2024
- Lisa Su
- AMD DEF 14A, filed March 2024
Three details matter. Cook's total is mostly equity valued at grant, not cash. Pichai's 2023 total is low because he received no annual equity grant that year, which Alphabet states in the proxy. Dimon's stake is the largest and the hardest to price, because a block of it vests only on performance conditions.
No dollar value is printed for holdings on purpose. The ownership table gives a record date, and the closing price for that date is the reader's input.
Newer filings for every company sit in EDGAR, so treat the table as a worked method. Pull the latest proxy for a company before you quote its numbers.
Compare design, not totals
The total is the least informative line in a document full of informative ones.
Ask what share of a package is contingent, over how long, and measured against what. Ask whether awards vest on time served or on results. Those questions use what the filings were written to answer.
For the same reading habit applied across film, sport and music, contracts and salaries shows how pay terms get set once an agent and a lawyer are in the room.
What a reported total contains
A reported total is a sum, not a payment. The investor education glossary on executive compensation lists the categories that get added together.
[figure 2]
What a Reported Total Adds
- Base salary
- Actual bonus paid
- Grant-date value of equity awards
- Everything the company classifies as a perquisite
- Base salary for the year.
- Bonus and non-equity incentive pay actually earned.
- Grant-date fair value of equity awards.
- Perquisites and anything else the company counts as compensation.
Grant-date value is a model output, and the company chooses the inputs. Two officers granted similar awards in the same year can report different totals because the share price moved between grant dates.
What a filing can carry, and what it cannot, is broken down in executive net worth, which sets out the limits for readers who want them.
Example: pricing a disclosed holding
Pricing a disclosed holding
- Take the share count from the ownership table and the record date printed beside it.
- Find the closing price on that record date, not today's price.
- Multiply, then write the result with the date and the price attached.
As an illustration, 3.3 million shares at a $200 close gives $660 million. Move the date and the number moves with it. Keep unvested and performance-vesting awards labelled rather than folded in.
Where the filings live
Pull each company's proxy from the commission's EDGAR full text search. The glossary entry on a proxy statement explains which tables carry pay and which carry ownership.
Check the fiscal year end on the cover page before comparing. Apple's year ends in late September, so its fiscal 2023 proxy and a calendar 2023 proxy overlap by nine months, not twelve.
Why published net worth tables disagree
Most published tables mix one filed pay figure with an estimated stake and a guessed value for private assets, then print a single number with no date. Two outlets doing that for the same person routinely land hundreds of millions apart.
The compression hides composition, which is the failure set out in richest rankings. A figure with no date and no components cannot be checked by anyone.
