MICROSOFT CORP (MSFT) reported total compensation of $96.50 million for Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella in fiscal year 2025. That figure is the Summary Compensation Table total from the latest filed proxy statement: salary, bonus, stock and option awards and all other compensation added together. It is the largest single number attached to his name in the company's disclosure documents.
Against that, the buying record is empty. Satya Nadella has made no open-market purchase of Microsoft stock in our Form 4 record. That is ordinary rather than suspicious: most chief executives are paid in stock and never buy more, because the shares arrive through grants and vesting rather than through a broker.
The composition matters more than the headline total. Base salary is $2,500,000. Everything above that, the overwhelming majority of the $96.50 million, comes from the other components of the Summary Compensation Table, principally equity awards whose value is reported at grant and realized only later, if at all, depending on vesting conditions and the share price when the shares come free.
Nadella has run Microsoft since February 4th, 2014, which makes him one of the longer-tenured chief executives in Technology Services. Over that stretch the stock has returned 914.19% since the day he took the job. The company now carries a market capitalization of $3,959,349,575,680.
Open-market buys in our data are Form 4 code P only. Awards are not purchases. Option exercises are not purchases. A chief executive who receives $96.50 million in a year and files no code P transaction has done nothing unusual, and a chief executive who buys a small block of stock has not thereby validated anything. The two facts sit side by side in the record and should be read side by side.
What this does not show is also worth stating plainly. Compensation is not a verdict on performance, and the proxy total is an accounting measure assembled under SEC disclosure rules, not a bank deposit. A grant is not a purchase, and the absence of a purchase is not a signal about the business, the outlook or the share price. Nothing in the filings explains motive, and we do not infer one. The record shows what was paid and what was bought, and in this case what was bought on the open market is nothing.
For readers tracking insider behavior across the sector, the useful comparison is not the size of a pay package but whether any cash of the executive's own has moved into the stock. At Microsoft, on the record available to us, it has not. That places Nadella alongside the large majority of his peers rather than apart from them.
Sources: the company's latest filed proxy statement and SEC Form 4 filings via EDGAR, reviewed by InsiderBuying.com.
See the full record for MICROSOFT CORP (MSFT) → insiderbuying.com/companies/MSFT