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The S&P 500’s seven largest stocks — Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, NVIDIA and Tesla — collectively known as the Magnificent 7, remained at the center of the executive-pay debate in 2025.
But this year’s disclosures point to a growing divergence not just in how these companies pay the CEOs at the center of such AI-era tech empires, but in how those pay structures align with performance, and how investors respond to them.
Median granted CEO pay among the group reached $25.1 million in 2025, down from $27.2 million in 2024, still comfortably ahead of the broader S&P 500, where granted pay rose 8% to $18.2 million.
Yet while the S&P 500 delivered a 17.9% return, five of the seven tech giants underperformed it and investor support for their pay plans varied sharply.
Common blueprint, different mechanics
While all seven use broadly similar language focused on long-term alignment, retention and shareholder value, CEO pay is built in notably different ways.
Base, cash incentives, long-term equity
Apple, Microsoft and NVIDIA all share familiar committee-designed models.
Apple says its executive compensation program is designed to “pay for performance and retain strong, values-driven leaders,” and it continues to rely on three core elements: base salary, annual cash incentives and long-term equity awards. Tim Cook’s granted compensation edged down slightly in 2025 to $74.3 million, including $57.5 million in stock awards. Cook is set to step down as CEO in September when John Ternus, who currently serves as senior vice president of hardware engineering, will take the helm.
Microsoft uses a similar architecture but with a more overtly performance-weighted mix. The tech giant says more than 95% of Satya Nadella’s target compensation opportunity is performance-based and that his equity is delivered entirely through performance stock awards. Nadella’s granted compensation rose 22% to reach $96.5 million in 2025, with $84.2 million coming from stock awards and a $2.5 million base salary.
NVIDIA, which topped the Mag 7 for total shareholder return (TSR) in 2025, delivering almost 39% for investors, stressed in its latest filing that executive compensation is heavily weighted toward performance-based, at-risk variable cash and long-term equity, with 100% of Jensen Huang’s equity awards granted as performance share units (PSUs). Huang’s granted compensation fell 27% to $36.3 million in fiscal 2026, with the dip reflecting how grant-date accounting can reduce reported award values even when boards remain heavily reliant on equity.
The underlying rationale is consistent across all three. Apple emphasizes a mix of performance-based and time-based RSUs, using relative TSR to judge part of the award and longer vesting to support retention. Microsoft leans more heavily on pre-set financial and operational measures, while NVIDIA links a substantial part of executive pay to revenue, non-GAAP operating income and multi-year TSR outcomes.
Low salary and infrequent, long-vesting RSU awards
Amazon and Alphabet sit somewhere between this conventional model and the founder-heavy outliers. Amazon’s proxy defends periodic, long-vesting RSU grants as a better way to focus executives on “true long-term success” than one-, two- or three-year targets, and notes that it has not granted CEO Andrew Jassy a new equity award since 2021. That helps explain why Jassy’s reported compensation remains relatively modest by Magnificent 7 standards: it rose by almost 30% in 2025, but only to $2.1 million, driven mainly by security costs. Amazon recorded the lowest level of TSR for 2025 out of all its Mag 7 peers at 5.2%.
Alphabet presents a more typical senior-executive framework but still stresses that named executive officer pay is primarily equity-based, multi-year in design and subject to a TSR modifier. Sundar Pichai’s granted compensation for 2025 was $10.9 million, up 1% from the previous year, including around $2 million in salary with the remainder also largely tied to personal security. Pichai’s last major equity award came in 2022 and vested at the end of 2025.
CEO centrality
The clearest contrast is evident in the cases of Tesla and Meta, where the CEO’s centrality to the company fundamentally shapes the role that executive compensation is expected to play.
Meta says its executive compensation program is heavily weighted toward equity and long-term incentives, but Mark Zuckerberg himself remains an exception: he continues to receive a $1 salary, does not participate in the annual bonus plan and receives no new equity awards, with compensation instead driven largely by security arrangements. In 2025, his reported compensation was about $25.1 million. Zuckerberg - as founder, chair and CEO - owns a controlling stake that gives him 60.8% voting power.
At Tesla, meanwhile, the company stresses that its mission is long term by nature and that its compensation philosophy reflects that reality. In 2025, the board formed a special committee to consider how best to retain and incentivize Elon Musk, then approved a new performance-based restricted stock award intended to drive what it called Tesla’s “next phase of transformational growth.”
The scale is in a category of its own. Musk’s 2025 CEO performance award was valued at $158.4 billion. While Musk receives no salary, the valuation is made almost entirely of equity awards linked to ambitious performance conditions. The structure is broken across 12 tranches: escalating market-cap milestones reaching $8.5 trillion and operational milestones tied to goals such as vehicle deliveries, Robotaxis and adjusted EBITDA.
The investor test
Ultimately, the 2025 proxy season suggested that investors were more persuaded by some pay-for-alignment narratives than others, particularly where compensation structures remained closer to conventional market practice.
Despite delivering one of the weaker returns in the group, Amazon won the strongest support for its pay plan at its most recent annual meeting, with 94% backing. NVIDIA, the top performer, was close behind on 93%, followed by Microsoft on 92% and Apple on 91%.
The sharpest pushback came where pay structures looked more exceptional. Tesla’s plan received just 78% support, while Meta faced by far the strongest dissent, with just 27% of shareholders backing its pay proposal. Taken together, the results suggest that investors may still accept high pay and imperfect performance, but they are far less comfortable when boards depart too far from familiar compensation frameworks.
