Twitter CFO Anthony Noto Was Top-Paid Executive Last Year

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Twitter Chief Financial Officer Anthony Noto, who joined only last year, was the top earner at the micro-blogging company last year. Noto left his thriving career at Goldman Sachs to join Twitter.

Twitter more generous toward CFOs

Noto, in total, received compensation of $72.8 million, which includes stock valued at $63.1 million and options of $9.5 million as per a proxy statement filed by Twitter recently. While it might come as a surprise, even the sum total of the salaries of five other major executives, including CEO Dick Costolo, who received $14,000 as compensation, could not total to the compensation received alone by the new CFO. The total compensation of these five executives could barely surpass half of that received by Noto.

Twitter pays its CFO the highest among all executives. The previous CFO, Mike Gupta, was paid $24.6 million as compensation in 2013, which was the also the highest at that time. Gupta now handles the venture capital arm of the company, and with the change of role, his compensation also took a sharp fall and was noted at $263,234 for 2014.

Salary for other executives

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo has been reducing his base salary from $200,000 in 2012 to about $14,000 in 2014. Costolo’s financial condition is not weak though. Twitter shares worth more than $20 million have been sold by his family trust, and in addition, the CEO owns options worth hundreds of millions of dollars more.

Another executive whose pay was mentioned in the filing was Twitter’s engineering chief, Alex Roetter. The executive’s total pay amounted to $19.1 million, which includes an $18.8 million stock award. Pay for Twitter General Counsel Vijaya Gadde was reduced nearly in half to $7.9 million, and Kevin Weil, who now is head of product, made $13 million last year.

Twitter will report its first quarter earnings next week. For the last quarter, the micro-blogging company witnessed a slowdown in user growth, but revenues almost doubled to $479 million.

On Monday, Twitter shares closed up 1.46% at $51.40, while year to date, the stock is up by over 40%.

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