Amazon's top paid executive is Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon Web Services, who pulled in $35.6 million last year -- far more than CEO Jeff Bezos, who made $1.7 million.
So that must be awkward when they bump into each other in the coffee room.
Amazon.com Inc. (Nasdaq: AMZN) disclosed the pay packages in regulatory filings this week, and also revealed the pay packages for other top executives. CFO Brian Olsavsky made $4.6 million; SVP of business development Jeffrey Blackburn got $22.2 million; SVP of the international consumer business Diego Piacentini got $23.7 million, and worldwide consumer CEO Jeffrey Wilke got $33 million.
Most of the pay comes from stock awards.
Bezos isn't living off dog food. He has nearly 17% beneficial ownership of Amazon shares, and is the second wealthiest person in the world, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires index.
Figure 1: 
We'll leave it to philosophers and economists to decide whether any individual deserves as much money as Jassy. But he's certainly not a slacker. Under his leadership, Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) has gone from a joke -- what does a company that sells sweatsocks know about managing other companies' IT infrastructure? -- to an industry titan and a crucial driver of Amazon's growth. (See AWS Tops in Public Cloud, but Azure Is Catching Up.)
In the fourth quarter of fiscal 2016, Amazon reported net AWS sales of $3.5 billion, up 47% year-over-year, and annual sales of $12.2 billion, up 55% year-over-year. That's slower than it was in the year-ago quarter, when the AWS business grew 69%, but it's still a giddy pace of growth. Overall Amazon revenue in the fourth quarter was $43.7 billion. (See AWS Growth Slows, But Amazon's Still Killing It in Cloud.)
Jassy's $35.6 million paycheck is bigger than the severance package Marissa Mayer got from Yahoo. However, Jassy is running a successful business, so that seems fair. (See Yahoo's Marissa Mayer Gets $23M Kiss-Off.)
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— Mitch Wagner
Editor, Enterprise Cloud News