The 10 Highest Paid Tech CEOs

Thirty years ago, the only CEO’s that got multimillion dollar paydays were bigwigs in the oil, automobile, steel or railroad industries. The industry greats of years past have now been overshadowed by the new kings of wealth in the technology industry.

From computers to tablets to smartphones, technology has become a part and parcel of our lives. As technology companies emerge as some of the largest establishments worldwide, CEOs earn top dollar to ensure that their company strategies have the competitive advantage in the market while pleasing shareholders and consumers. Today’s tech companies boast more acquisitions and mergers than both banks and oil companies combined.

We found 10 CEOs that have established themselves at the top of the tech industry, earning big titles and big paychecks. Let’s start with a former engineer who decided to collaborate on a startup company in the 1980’s, at which point his entire life changed.

#10 – John Chambers (Cisco Systems, $21 Million/Year)

John Chambers traveled around the country as a young man to get his education. He earned degrees at both West Virginia University and Indiana University, and also attended Duke University. After Chambers completed his many years of schooling, he started working in tech sales at IBM when the company was still very young. After great success at IBM, Chambers moved on to Wang Laboratories and quickly climbed the corporate ladder, becoming their Vice President of Operations.

After almost a decade with Wang Laboratories, Chambers left the corporation to join Cisco, a company that had just gone public the year before. Due to Chambers success with one of Cisco’s startups involving IBM, Cisco quickly named him CEO. Chambers still holds the position and has increased Cisco’s revenue from $70 million to $46 billion during his tenure with the company. His reward has been a $21 million annual salary.

#9 – Marissa Mayer (Yahoo!, $24.9 Million/Year)

Mayer is just in her late 30’s and has been the President and CEO of Yahoo! since the summer of 2012. Before working with the internet company, Mayer was headed down a much different career path. She attended Stanford University with the initial intention to become a neurosurgeon. But after a short period of time, Mayer switched her program to symbolic systems, and was teaching classes by her junior year.

After graduating from college, Mayer was highly sought after by leading corporations. She was hired by Google in 1999 as an engineer and was promoted several times throughout her tenure. Yahoo! needed a new CEO in 2012 and intended to poach someone away from Google, the search engine that had been dominating the market. Mayer was the perfect fit. Although shares are not at an all-time high for Yahoo!, Mayer is still raking in almost $25 million per year.

#8 – Paul Ricci (Nuance Communications, $29.2 Million/Year)

Paul Ricci has served as the head of Nuance Communications since the summer of 2000, after bouncing around a few companies during the 1990’s. Ricci served as the Vice President of Development at Xerox and held several other roles within the company. Like Mayer, Ricci also attended Stanford University but earned his degree in economics, which goes to show that you don’t have to be a lifelong techie to run a successful technology company.

Nuance Communications is located near Boston, Massachusetts and primarily focuses on speech recognition and telephonic services. With speech recognition being used more and more (Nuance developed Siri), the company has seen quite a bit of growth since their early days in 1992. Nuance is now an international company that has acquired dozens of small businesses, which has solidified their status as leaders in the field.

#7 – John Legere (T-Mobile, $29.2 Million/Year)

Originally, John Legere wanted to become a physical education teacher, but he changed his mind to pursue a career that would make him a lot more money— millions, as it turned out. Legere started his career with AT&T and spent 20 years with the company, and later served as the Chief Executive for the Asian division.

Legere also held executive positions at Dell and Global Crossing, which lead up to his current position (since 2012) as CEO and President of T-Mobile. T-Mobile is the leading non-contract cell phone provider in the United States and has seen an influx of new customers who don’t want to be tied down to service plans and contracts. T-Mobile’s marketing efforts have really paid off, yielding almost $30 million per year into Legere’s pocket.

#6 – Tony Aquila (Solera Holdings, $29.9 Million/Year)

Tony Aquila has been the founder of several software companies, but it wasn’t until he started Solera Holdings in 2005 that he became one of the highest paid CEOs in the tech field. Aquila also served in executive positions with Ensera, Inc., Mitchell International, MaxMeyer and seemingly about 413 other companies within the industry. Solera Holdings is based out of Westlake, Texas and has been a huge hit with more than 2,000 employees.

Solera is the provider for software that is used for processing automobile claims. If you ever get into a car accident and need to call your insurance company, the person on the other end of the phone call will likely be using a Solera product to enter your information. While this may seem extremely simple, insurance is a huge market and Solera makes millions by contracting their services.

#5 – Marc Benioff (Salesforce, $31.3 Million/Year)

Marc Benioff was still in high school when he sold his first software application that taught people how to juggle. Although he only made $75 off of the app, that was a good chunk of change to a 15-year old. Benioff founded his own software company shortly thereafter and sold games for the Atari and for personal computers. He used the royalties he made to pay for college at the University of Southern California.

After finishing college, in 1999 Benioff started Salesforce.com out of San Francisco, which is a site that specializes in cloud storage. Companies that needed to share information and files with fellow employees now had an easy way to do it with Salesforce. As a result of the practicality and usefulness of the program, revenues have eclipsed $4 billion in recent years. Benioff has been named one of the smartest people in the tech industry with a salary that reflects as much at over $31 million per year.

#4 – Stephen Kaufer (TripAdvisor, $39 Million/Year)

Stephen Kaufer attended Harvard University and graduated from the computer science department, which set him up for success fairly quickly. In early 2000, Kaufer co-founded the website TripAdvisor, which provides reviews on just about any location across the world. TripAdvisor gets their reviews from people who have visited these locations.

This wasn’t the original plan for the site, as it was supposed to contain content from official guidebooks and magazines. These days, TripAdvisor is one of the first sites that people visit when planning a vacation, and because of its widespread popularity, it nets almost $1 billion annually. With over a quarter billion unique viewers each year, there are a lot of advertising dollars to be made, with almost $40 million of profits going straight into Kaufer’s bank account each year.

#3 – Jeff Weiner (LinkedIn, $49.1 Million/Year)

Jeff Weiner attended and graduated from the famous Ivy League school, the University of Pennsylvania. After a few years of working in various tech companies, Yahoo! hired Weiner to fill an executive position, where he managed a few thousand employees. Weiner also spent some time with Warner Bros. before being tabbed as the Interim President with the website, LinkedIn.com.

LinkedIn is a professional social networking site that has been around since 2003; however, Weiner didn’t come on board until 2008. The website is used for networking among professionals, and also serves as a job board for those that want to pursue a different career in their field. Today, LinkedIn is one of the 20 most visited websites in the United States and has an advertising revenue well over $1.5 billion. Weiner’s interim status has since been eliminated, making him the official LinkedIn CEO.

#2 – Don Mattrick (Zynga, $57.8 Million/Year)

Don Mattrick has been involved in games for a very long time. At just 17 years old, Mattrick founded a company that created the game “Test Drive” for Apple computers, which was bought out by Electronic Arts. Mattrick was hired by the company and served as an executive until he left in 2004. From there, Mattrick was hired by Microsoft to help oversee their Xbox and PC game department, during which time the company saw their subscribed games numbers grow by seven times from what they were.

Mattrick was in charge of many different ventures with Xbox, including showing off the new Xbox One to consumers and reporters. Despite criticism about the specs of the new gaming console, Microsoft didn’t exactly suffer. Zynga, the company that created Farmville, was on the downswing and wanted a new spark, so they hired Mattrick to become their new CEO. Stocks immediately increased, and because of his help in turning things around, Mattrick is being paid $57.8 million annually.

#1 – Larry Ellison (Oracle, $78.4 Million/Year)

Larry Ellison is the highest paid tech CEO on our list, and is the third richest person in the United States with a net worth over $56 billion. Ellison’s yearly salary of $78.4 million might, of course, have something to do with that. Ellison acted as the CEO of Oracle from 1977 to 2014 and has since become an executive chairman and CTO with the company. Ellison started the company with just a $2,000 investment in the late 1970’s and was able to secure a huge partnership with IBM in the early 1980’s.

Since then, Oracle has become a massive company that is worth about $40 billion. As the founder, Ellison has rightfully deserved a nice cut of the action. The amount of money Ellison has made is incredible, especially when you consider the fact that he never graduated college.