Microsoft’s Cloud + AI organization pays base salaries as high as $450K and stock grants as high as $1.4M, far above every other team, according to a leaked internal pay-transparency spreadsheet with almost 600 US entries obtained by Business Insider. Xbox staff reported base pay topping out at $218K and stock at $65K, and even the separate Microsoft AI group capped out at $140K in stock. Annual raises came in thin everywhere, mostly under 3% and never above 5% at any level, so the equity grant is doing nearly all the work in what Microsoft pays to hold onto engineers. The spreadsheet is self-reported and anonymous, covers a sliver of a 223,000-person workforce, and probably skews low because senior staff tend not to fill it in. Microsoft declined to comment.
