Softbank CEO Nikesh Arora gets a record salary of $75 million
FollowÂ
SoftBank Group President Nikesh Arora paid 8.04 billion yen salary  ($73 million) last year, making him one of the top paid executives in the world for the second year in a row. The pay package puts Arora, who joined SoftBank from Google in 2014, in the same league as Apple's Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Tim Cook and Walt Disney's Bob Iger, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Arora's compensation includes 1.56 billion yen paid by other SoftBank units, according to a proxy statement issued by the mobile and Internet company on Thursday.
Arora was paid 16.6 billion yen in the previous financial year, when he started working at SoftBank, setting a record for compensation in Japan. SoftBank said at the time that the pay package included a signing bonus. Arora held unvested Google stock options and other securities $76 million at the end of 2013, according to the last proxy statement before his departure. "This seems like a lot of money by Japanese standards but there are plenty of executives overseas who get paid at the same level," said Tomoaki Kawasaki, an analyst at Iwai Cosmo Securities Co. "Arora already has been building a track record at SoftBank with some overseas acquisitions. Having him at the company also helps attract high-grade overseas talent."
According to Bloomberg's executive-pay analysis, Patrick Soon-Shiong is currently the highest-paid CEO, with compensation valued at $329.7 million at NantKwest, a cancer-research company. Among non-CEOs in the US, only Blackstone Group President Hamilton Evans James had a bigger pay package than Arora. By comparison, Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman Sachs Group's CEO, was paid $33.1 million. Google CEO Sundar Pichai was the third highest paid executive with a pay package of $151.90 million.
Arora, who is responsible for global operations, plans to invest about $3 billion each year as SoftBank seeks to invest in start-ups that can become the next Alibaba Group Holding, the Chinese e-commerce company that pulled off the world's largest initial public offering in 2014.
