This Was Amazon's Highest-earning Employee In 2016 - GeekWire

Amazon Web Services is a cloud powerhouse, a more than $12 billion enterprise that would be a significant company on its own. So it’s no surprise that Amazon is rewarding the man in charge of AWS, its CEO Andy Jassy.

Jassy received approximately $35.6 million in total compensation in 2016, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission disclosed Wednesday. That figure makes Jassy Amazon’s highest paid executive among the six the company has to disclose publicly.

Executive salaries at Amazon aren’t as high as some other companies — Jassy pulled in $175,000 in base salary in 2016 — but the online retail giant more than makes up for it with big stock grants for top performers that vest over a number of years. Jassy was awarded shares valued at $35.4 million, according to the filing, that are now worth approximately $54 million as of close of business Tuesday, according to Bloomberg.

Amazon said its stock rose 88 percent between between January 2014 and December 2016, and it has risen another 20 percent since the start of the year. A pair of Wall Street analysts predicted last year that Amazon stock would soon hit $1,000 per share on the back of its growing logistics network and early lead in the voice assistant market, thanks to Alexa.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos took his customary $81,840 annual salary as well as $1.6 million for security services, according to the filing. Bezos, who is now the second richest person in the world, gets his wealth from his ownership stake in Amazon and has never received any additional stock-based compensation from the company.

Here’s a look at the compensation packages of other top Amazon executives in 2016:

• Jeffrey Wilke, CEO worldwide consumer: $32.9 million
• Diego Piacentini, senior vice president of international consumer business: $23.7 million
• Jeffrey Blackburn, senior vice president of business development: $22.2 million
• Brian Olsavsky, senior vice president and chief financial officer: $4.5 million

Amazon explained its compensation policy, which emphasizes long-term success over immediate achievement, in the SEC filing ahead of its annual shareholder meeting:

We believe that a fundamental measure of our success will be the shareholder value we create over the long term. As a result, we may make decisions and weigh tradeoffs differently than some companies. For example, under our compensation philosophy, we have prioritized stock-based compensation that vests over an extended period of time. In addition, we believe granting stock-based compensation to employees at all levels across the Company results in motivated, customer-centric people who think and act like owners because they are owners.