RJ Scaringe Didn’t Actually Make $403 Million in 2025

Almost every story you’ve read this week about RJ Scaringe getting paid $403 million is technically correct and meaningfully misleading at the same time. The number comes straight from Rivian’s proxy filing, the SEC requires it to be disclosed that way, but it’s not money that hit RJ’s bank account in 2025. Most of it is paper value tied to stock options that only pay out if Rivian roughly 9x’s from where it sits today over the next decade.

Here’s what actually happened.

The $402.6 million figure is built from $373.5 million in stock options, $26.6 million in stock awards, $1.12 million in salary, and a $1.02 million bonus paid in fully vested RSUs at a $15.10 share price. Only the salary and bonus are real cash or near cash. The $373.5 million is the grant-date fair value of his new performance award, which is just an accounting model’s estimate of what the options could theoretically be worth if everything goes right.

If RIVN sits at $15 for the next ten years, that $373.5 million turns into zero. RJ doesn’t see a dollar of it unless the stock climbs to at least $40, he pays $15.22 per share to exercise, he’s still CEO when each tranche vests, and Rivian hits adjusted operating income and cash flow targets along the way.

The actual money RJ took home in 2025 looks closer to $25 million, almost all of which came from Rivian’s micromobility spinout Also buying back about 1.35 million of his existing shares at the Series C price. That’s not new compensation. It’s converting equity he already owned into cash.

So why does any of this matter?

Because the entire reason this new award exists is that the 2021 version paid him exactly zero. The board cancelled it last November because the stock price targets had drifted so far out of reach that the package stopped functioning as an incentive at all. The new one was rebuilt with lower hurdles, but it still requires the kind of company-defining outcomes that, if RJ actually hits them, would hand shareholders roughly $153 billion of additional value along the way.

There’s a real conversation to be had about whether even the lower targets are still too generous, or whether the pay ratio is rough regardless of how you slice it. The proxy lists his package at 4,458 times the median Rivian employee, which is a number that deserves to be talked about honestly. But “RJ pocketed $403 million while Rivian lost $3.6 billion” isn’t honest. It’s a different story than the one the filing actually tells.

It’s also worth saying that this is how almost every founder CEO at a public tech company is being paid now. Musk’s $1 trillion package gets the headlines because of the dollar figure, but the structure of a giant performance options grant tied to multi-year stock and profitability targets has basically become standard. Lucid just adopted a near-identical framework for their incoming CEO earlier this month.

The criticism of executive comp culture isn’t wrong. It’s just being aimed at the wrong number. The $403 million is what the SEC made Rivian disclose. What RJ actually earned is closer to a couple million in salary and bonus and a one-time cash event from the Also spinout.

Everything else is a bet that he’ll spend the next decade turning a company that just lost $3.6 billion into one that’s profitable and worth multiples of what it is now. If he pulls that off, the package looks reasonable. If he doesn’t, the package is mostly worth nothing, just like the 2021 one.

Q1 earnings are tomorrow. We’ll see how the year is starting.