Amazon (AMZN) CEO Andy Jassy saw his compensation shrink by more than 99 percent in 2022 as he received no stock award during a difficult year for the e-commerce giant, according to a company filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission today (April 13).
Jassy’s base salary actually jumped more than 80 percent in 2022 to $317,500 from the previous year’s $175,000. But his total pay dropped to $1.30 million last year from $212.7 million in 2021, according to today’s filing.
Stock awards make up the majority of compensation for many high-level executives at publicly traded companies. In 2021, Jassy received nearly $212 million worth of stock awards as part of a stock bonus package that would take him 10 years to fully earn. The number put him among the highest paid CEOs in the world that year, and Amazon was criticized for paying its CEO 6,474 times more than an average employee.
Last year, Jassy received no stock award and only $975,123 in “security arrangements” related to business travel in addition to his base salary. And as a result, Amazon noted the CEO-employee pay ratio was much lower in 2022 at 38:1. The national median for S&P 500 companies was 192:1 in 2021. Last year’s number is not calculated yet as many companies haven’t filed 2022 proxy statements yet.
Jassy, 55, was promoted to CEO of Amazon in July 2021, replacing founder Jeff Bezos. Before the promotion, Jassy was the head of Amazon’s cloud-computing business, Amazon Web Services (AWS), for 15 years.
At the end of 2022, Jassy owned 2.04 million Amazon shares, or about 0.02 percent of the company worth, $200 million, according to today’s filing.
Amazon’s stock price fell nearly 50 percent in 2022, faring much worse than S&P 500’s 19.4 percent decline. The company has laid off about 18,000 employees and shut down several experimental projects since January to cut costs.
In his annual letter to shareholders published today, Jassy described 2022 as one of the hardest years in Amazon’s history but said he’s confident recent cost-cutting efforts will pay off.
“Over the last several months, we took a deep look across the company, business by business, invention by invention…In some cases, it led to us shuttering certain businesses,” Jassy wrote. “I’m optimistic that we’ll emerge from this challenging macroeconomic time in a stronger position than when we entered it.”