That 80 million "LTPSA" he got in 2014 are not unconditional... It's quite easy for him to lose that money, so there is at least a strong incentive for him not to cause excessive damage...

(If footnote 2 from the compensation table in the linked text is insufficient in terms of details, there are further materials I've read a few hours ago, but I don't remember the details or urls...

In any case, the bottom line is that I was almost certain that there was a conflict of interest here between his incentives and company's best interests, and now I am not sure, after doing that research prompted by your previous question...

I am now agnostic on that, that's all... His compensation numbers in a year would tell us more...

But I think I'll leave it at that; to come up with a definite conclusion would probably require investing more effort than I want to put into this...

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I did hear some versions about synergies with LinkedIn which made some sense; like putting all that LinkedIn info into Cortana to assist people in their business dealings with each other, and perhaps even projecting that onto HoloLens eventually... I had a chance to try their HoloLens recently, and it was quite impressive, so they probably take that possibility into account...

Even if it sounds like a risky bet, it's not altogether crazy... The LinkedIn stock curve was also suggestive if one looks at the complete history of that - they've met each other half-way, I would say...
)

В таблице:

http://www.geekwire.com/2015/microsoft-ceo-satya-nadella-gets-18-3m-in-annual-compensation-as-board-cites-strong-consistent-vision/

Scroll down, see the big table, stock awards column,
year 2014 row for Nadella, amount 79777109 (read footnote 2 to that table).

I am not saying there is no conflict of interests, I am just uncertain (an agnostic position does not need to be defended much, does it? ;-) )

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В этих транзакциях нужно иметь в виду, что их мог бы и кто-нибудь другой купить... Плюс для Микрософта состоит в том, что они предотвращают такую возможность...

Yes, he can lose that "80 million", if the overall performance is really bad... If it will be like the acquisition of Nokia devices, when Microsoft decided to write-off over 8 billion (more than the whole deal price) as a loss, I think there is no way he would be able to convert that conditional stock award into his property... (It's also stock, so the shares better not fall...)

Net loss or no net loss, who cares (they don't count money with this kind of granularity, the stakes in that game are much higher), but if it is again a huge write-off, like with Nokia devices (which were bought before he became the CEO, so he was not responsible for that), there seems to be quite a bit protection built-in against this particular CEO being able to cash on things like that... (I don't think this protection was in place for his predecessor, who accumulated way too much personal power).

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If a competitor acquires, they might not be open to a licensing or technology deal with Microsoft, and many of them have products competing directly with Cortana and such... So a competitor would gain an advantage, and an opportunity to move forward here would probably be lost forever...

To lose ALL of 26B would be rich ;-) I mostly think an intermediate-scale disaster, like losing a third of that, that is all of the premium over market cap in that deal... That would be quite enough, and much more realistic...

But unless it is a publicly visible multibillion-dollar write-off, nobody would care...

Stagnation would not be welcome for Microsoft as a whole, but specifically at the LinkedIn level would not be too much of a problem for Nadella...

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Facebook is different; MS wants business social graph, that is linkedin, they don't care about causal social... Their business model favors that quite specifically...

Facebook can also become a competitor at any moment, even if the relations are currently good...

Мне всё это тоже не кажется разумным... И в этом е-майле, который Наделла послал сотрудникам Микрософта по этому поводу, я как-то не усматриваю никакого разумного содержания:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/3083064/data-center-cloud/heres-microsoft-ceos-letter-to-employees-about-the-26-billion-linkedin-acquisition.html