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Nvidia has been on a hot streak so far this year — and its chief executive is headed for compensation outpacing his chip rivals.
CEO Jensen Huang earned $34.2 million in total compensation for fiscal year 2024 — a 60% jump from his total compensation of $21.4 million in fiscal year 2023, according to a proxy statement released Tuesday. He earned $23.7 million in total compensation for fiscal year 2022.
Stock awards played a large part in Huang’s compensation boost, as his base salary has hovered just below $1 million for the past three years. Huang earned $26.7 million in stock awards for fiscal year 2024 — up from $19.7 million in fiscal year 2023.
Nvidia’s stock is up 95.8% year-to-date, and the company’s shares rallied after it reported fourth-quarter revenues of $22 billion in February — up nearly 270% from the previous year. The company’s stock took a hit a day before it was set to report fourth-quarter earnings due to fears it would miss Wall Street’s soaring expectations.
Huang earned $2.5 million in “other compensation” in fiscal year 2024 — $2.2 million of which was cost to the company for residential security and consultation fees, security monitoring services, and car and driver services. It’s a far jump from the previous fiscal year’s “other compensation” of almost $694,000.
“Due to the high profile of our CEO, and in accordance with the independently-assessed executive security program established by our Board, NVIDIA provides Mr. Huang with security protection,” Nvidia said in the proxy statement. “We do not consider these additional security arrangements to be a personal benefit to Mr. Huang because they arise from the nature of his employment responsibilities and the related costs have been incurred as required by the Board’s executive security program,” the company added.
Pay is soaring for some of the chief executives of the top publicly traded companies in the United States. Median pay reached $15.6 million in 2023 among the chief executives of 187 S&P 500 companies, The Wall Street Journal found, using pay data from MyLogIQ. Meanwhile, a Quartz calculation found that Reddit co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman received a larger pay package than the chief executives of Pinterest, Snapchat, and Meta combined in 2023.