Management and incentives

Adobe Inc. ADBE

Adobe paid Shantanu Narayen $51.2 million for fiscal 2025, and over 90% of his target package was equity graded on two things: the new subscription dollars Adobe adds each year, and whether the stock beats the Nasdaq 100 over three calendar years. The stock half paid 41% and then 45% in the two most recent closed cycles and all three open windows sit underwater, so the pay now rides on the subscription number alone, which points to price increases, paid AI tiers and free-to-paid conversion rather than deals, because the plan strips acquisitions out.

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Adobe Inc. ADBEThe bet you're really making is that professional designers, marketers and businesses keep paying Adobe every month for Photoshop, Illustrator, and Acrobat instead of switching to cheaper AI-powered tools from new competitors. You're betting Adobe's own AI tools, built into the applications customers already use and trained on commercially licensed content, keep subscribers paying and renewing instead of leaving. Right now the renewals are holding: revenue and the backlog of signed future payments both grew 13% last quarter, though net income barely moved as Adobe invests in AI development. You pay 15 times earnings, and on sales the stock is the cheapest it has been in the twelve years this pack covers, trading below its historical floor. Company reportSep 6 Adobe Inc. ADBEA professional designer has spent fifteen years learning exactly where every tool lives, every client hands them a file that opens only in these programs, and the formats those files use are the common language the whole industry speaks, so leaving means relearning the craft and breaking every handoff at once. Adobe owns that toolchain and that language, which is a genuine switching-cost moat wrapped around an industry standard, and the real question is whether generative AI dissolves the skill the lock is built on or simply becomes the next feature Adobe sells. Competitive advantageAug 30 AppLovin Corporation APPAppLovin paid Adam Foroughi $12,969,001 in 2025, and every dollar above his $400,000 salary arrived as 20,236 restricted shares that vest on four calendar dates with no target, no hurdle and no performance condition of any kind. The company states in the same proxy that it used no financial performance measure to link pay to results, which leaves the share price as the only thing that pays him, and he holds 61.6% of the vote over everything that touches it. Management and incentivesSep 20 GoDaddy Inc. GDDYThe bet you're really making is that the millions of small businesses and solo operators who run their websites, email, and domains through GoDaddy keep paying every year, and keep buying more from it. You're betting the newer, higher-margin work, taking card payments and building online stores, grows faster than the old domain-and-hosting business it was built on. Right now it is going well: revenue rose 6.6% to the biggest quarter in the company's history, and operating profit jumped 32% as costs came down. You pay about 15 times last year's earnings and under 14 times next year's, among the lowest the stock has fetched since it listed in 2015, with the shares down a third from their high. Company reportSep 7