Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos made pretty good money last year, but two of his top lieutenants did considerably better in terms of pay.
Andy Jassy, leader of Amazon’s giant cloud computing effort, earned a whopping $35.6 million in total compensation in 2016, according to a proxy statement filed by Amazon with the Securities & Exchange Commission on Wednesday. The bulk of that pay came in a $35 million stock grant; Jassy’s regular salary is a more earth-bound $175,000.
AWS is on track for $14 billion in revenue this year. Given numbers like that, many who used to see the Amazon (AMZN) cloud business as an interesting sideline, now accept it as core to the company.
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Meanwhile, Jeffrey Wilke, who heads Amazon’s Consumer business which includes online retail operations and devices, received just under $33 million in total pay, of which $32.8 million came in a stock grant. His salary was also $175,000.
For the company’s fourth quarter ending December 31, 2016, while AWS posted net sales of over $3.5 billion, Amazon’s non-cloud sales in North America came in at more than $26 billion. The bulk of that is in retail.
Both Jassy and Wilke were promoted to be CEOs of their respective business units a year ago.
By comparison, Bezos’ total 2016 compensation was about $1.68 million, including a salary of just under $82,000.
Don’t cry for Bezos though. He is Amazon’s largest stock holder—last week he sold $1 billion worth of Amazon shares to fund Blue Origin, his space exploration venture. And, last month, Bloomberg estimated that he is now the world’s second richest person, with a net worth of $75.6 billion. That puts him ahead of former No. 2, Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffett.
Bezos still lagged $10.4 billion behind the richest of the rich, Microsoft (MSFT) co-founder Bill Gates, who has a net worth of $86 billion, according to Bloomberg.
