Amazon CEO Andy Jassy’s 2022 Pay Falls to $1.3M, Touts Ad Business in Annual Letter

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy saw his 2022 compensation crater in 2022, with a massive stock award he received in 2021 making up the backbone of his long-term Amazon renumeration.

According to Amazon’s annual proxy filing, which the company filed Thursday morning, Jassy was paid $1.3 million in 2022, including a $317,500 salary (that is famously the maximum base salary any employee at the company can receive). The remaining $981,000 included company personal security costs, travel costs, and company contributions to his 401K plan.

In 2021 Jassy received a stock grant valued at more than $200 million tied to his promotion to CEO, with the shares vesting over 10 years. “This award is designed to establish a long-term owner’s perspective and encourage bold, long-term initiatives, in the same manner that Mr. Bezos’s shares as founder incentivized him to focus on long-term, expansive growth, and is intended to represent most of Mr. Jassy’s compensation for the coming years,” Amazon’s board wrote in the new proxy.

Meanwhile, executive chairman Jeff Bezos received $1.7 million in compensation from Amazon, including an $81,000 salary and $1.6 million in security and travel costs.

The Amazon executive with the highest pay was AWS chief Adam Selipsky, who had a pay package topping $41 million, including that $317,000 salary and $40 million in stock awards. Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky earned $18.2 million, including a $314,000 salary and nearly $18 million in stock awards.

The proxy filing also coincided with the release of Jassy’s annual letter to shareholders, continuing a tradition started by Bezos in 1997. In his new letter, Jassy touches on his efforts to make the company more efficient, while also noting three areas of interest to Hollywood: The macroeconomy, large language models (LLMs) and advertising.

“Change is always around the corner. Sometimes, you proactively invite it in, and sometimes it just comes a-knocking. But, when you see it’s coming, you have to embrace it. And, the companies that do this well over a long period of time usually succeed,” Jassy wrote, noting that the company looked closely across its business and decided to shutter units and lay off staff.

With regard to advertising, Jassy was bullish, suggesting that the company will expand its streaming ad business (the company already has a free streaming video service called Freevee, and has ads in its Thursday Night Football broadcasts).

“We also see future opportunity to thoughtfully integrate advertising into our video, live sports, audio, and grocery products,” Jassy wrote. “We’ll continue to work hard to help brands uniquely engage with the right audience, and grow this part of our business.”

Finally, on LLMs, Jassy says the company has been working on its own models “for a while now” and is incorporating them into some AWS products. “I could write an entire letter on LLMs and Generative AI as I think they will be that transformative, but I’ll leave that for a future letter,” Jassy wrote. “Let’s just say that LLMs and Generative AI are going to be a big deal for customers, our shareholders, and Amazon.”