He may be the third richest man in the world, but his official salary is still less than… six figures.
Its 62-year-old founder is worth $254 billion, trailing only Tesla CEO and Google co-founder Larry Page, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
But for nearly his entire 25-year tenure as CEO of the top Fortune 500 company, Bezos has received the same $81,400 salary from Amazon — less than the average salary of a construction worker, Fortune notes.
Amazon’s 2026 proxy, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday, confirmed that Bezos continues to receive the same salary he has received since 1998, the year he increased his salary to $81,400 from $79,197 the previous year.
“Mr. Bezos has requested no additional compensation and has never received annual cash compensation in excess of his current amount,” the filing states.
His low salary has also not kept pace with inflation. In 1998, Bezos’ annual salary of $81,400 was more than double the average salary of $31,096 for men at the time. The same salary was only 16% higher than the average salary of $68,952 for men last year.
One of the reasons Bezos kept his salary low and never received stock compensation from Amazon is because he owned a large portion of the company anyway.
The oligarch Mr. Bezos
“I already owned a significant portion of the company, and I just didn’t feel right about taking more,” Bezos previously said during an interview at the New York Times DealBook Summit. “I just felt, ‘How could I need more motivation?’ I would just be disgusted by it.”
Bezos, who was replaced as CEO by Andy Jassy in 2021 and is now executive chairman, owns about 8% of the company and is its largest shareholder, according to Amazon’s most recent proxy statement. At Friday’s share price, Bezos’ stake in Amazon was worth about $225 billion, the bulk of his net worth. Because , in the past he could pay less than his actual tax rate, ProPublica reported in 2021.
All of Amazon’s executive pay is intentionally focused more on stock awards than cash. The company said in its proxy statement that those salaries, which are intended to be “significantly less than those paid to senior executives at similarly positioned companies,” “closely link total compensation to long-term shareholder value.”
Jassi, the company’s current CEO, earned $365,000 last year, which is the “base salary” for all of Amazon’s named executives, including Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman and Worldwide Amazon Stores CEO Doug Herrington, according to the proxy statement. At the same time, Jassi’s stock-based pay increased by nearly $473,000 between 2024 and 2025, according to the filing.
Of course, Bezos also receives certain perks thanks to his role as executive chairman. The company last year paid $1.6 million for Bezos’ security and business travel expenses.
“We believe that all security expenses incurred by the Company are reasonable and necessary and for the benefit of the Company, and that the amount of reported security expenses for Mr. Bezos is particularly reasonable given his low salary and the fact that he has never received stock-based compensation,” the company wrote in the proxy statement.
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