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Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol’s $96 million pay package dwarfs his predecessors

Starbucks is paying Niccol much, much more than it has paid any of its past CEOs.

1/27/25 12:10PM

Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol made $96 million in his first four months on the job, making him the most highly compensated chief exec in the company’s history by a long shot.

Niccol’s compensation consists mostly of equity in Starbucks, a regulatory filing submitted Friday showed. His compensation includes a $5 million sign-on bonus and about $91,000 in expenses related to his use of the company’s private jet, which transports him from his home in Southern California to Starbs’ HQ in Seattle.

The company’s board was obviously very eager to persuade Niccol to jump from Chipotle, where his total compensation in 2023 was $22.5 million. Investors were also excited to have him on board, which added $20 billion to the company’s market cap shortly after the move was announced.

Niccol’s $96 million pay package is a lot more than Starbucks has paid its CEOs in the past. From 2023 to 2017, Starbs spent a total of $103 million paying its CEOs. Even the company’s longtime top exec Howard Shultz was making about $20 million before he stepped down in 2017.

Starbucks has suffered from stagnant sales, a challenging international market, and a tumultuous relationship with a union that represents thousands of its baristas.

So far, Niccol has not drastically changed the company’s fortunes. He’s imposed changes that include a no-loitering policy, getting rid of the vegan-milk tax, and adding personality to the customer experience, like bringing back mugs, latte art, and handwritten names on coffee cups.

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OpenAI’s ARR reached over $20 billion in 2025, CFO says

Sam Altman’s $500 billion artificial intelligence behemoth hit a major financial milestone last year, according to a new blog post over the weekend from OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar, as the company confirmed it had hit a more than $20 billion annual revenue run rate at the end of 2025.

Elsewhere in the blog post, Friar spent time addressing the company’s shifting goals, referencing plans to “close the distance between where intelligence is advancing and how individuals, companies, and countries actually adopt and use it.” As has become customary in the AI company press release genre, the CFO was also keen to tout the unending growth of the business, writing:

“Both our Weekly Active User (WAU) and Daily Active User (DAU) figures continue to produce all-time highs. This growth is driven by a flywheel across compute, frontier research, products, and monetization.”
“Compute grew 3X year over year or 9.5X from 2023 to 2025: 0.2 GW in 2023, 0.6 GW in 2024, and ~1.9 GW in 2025.”

And, perhaps most importantly for current backers and those keeping an eye on the private company before its rumored mega IPO:

“Revenue followed the same curve growing 3X year over year, or 10X from 2023 to 2025: $2B ARR in 2023, $6B in 2024, and $20B+ in 2025. This is never-before-seen growth at such scale.”

That latest figure has certainly set tongues in the tech world wagging, just as the company announced it would begin rolling out ads to free and ChatGPT Go users. It also puts the chatbot giant a fair way ahead of competitors like Anthropic, the company behind Claude.

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A business that scales with the value of intelligence

“Both our Weekly Active User (WAU) and Daily Active User (DAU) figures continue to produce all-time highs. This growth is driven by a flywheel across compute, frontier research, products, and monetization.”
“Compute grew 3X year over year or 9.5X from 2023 to 2025: 0.2 GW in 2023, 0.6 GW in 2024, and ~1.9 GW in 2025.”