Management and incentives

Affirm Holdings, Inc. AFRM

Affirm paid Max Levchin $38,834 in cash for fiscal 2025, no bonus, and one long-term award: options on 12,500,000 shares booked at a grant-date value of $451.1M, which expired in fiscal 2026 with 8,500,000 of them unearned. The four officers below him are paid on a different scoreboard, cash for network size, revenue and a profit figure that leaves out stock compensation, depreciation and the shares handed to merchant partners.

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Affirm Holdings, Inc. AFRMThe bet you're really making is that Affirm keeps signing shoppers up to split purchases into fixed payments, and that more big stores, Amazon, Walmart, Shopify, keep putting its button at checkout. You're betting those shoppers pay Affirm back, because Affirm lends them the money itself and eats the loss when they don't, funded by cheap borrowing. Right now it is going well: the purchases run through it grew 38% last year to about $45 billion, and it earned its first full year of operating profit. You pay 13 times last year's earnings, but that is a mirage: a one-time tax gain nearly doubled the number, and on what the business truly earns you pay nearer 65 times, richer than it has looked in its short life public. Company reportSep 6 SoFi Technologies, Inc. SOFIThe bet you're really making is that SoFi keeps turning a phone app into a real bank, taking in customers' deposits cheaply and lending that money back out at a profit. Underneath that, you are betting the people it lends to, mostly personal-loan borrowers, keep paying on time as SoFi lends more and more. Right now it is going well: the biggest revenue quarter in the company's history, up 39%, an eighth straight quarter of profit, though earnings slipped about 6% from the quarter before. You pay about 38 times last year's earnings, and since SoFi only turned its first profit in 2024, part of it from a one-time tax break, there is no long record of what the stock usually costs. Company reportSep 7 Navient Corporation NAVIThe bet you're really making is that Navient's mountain of old student loans, which it stopped adding to, pays back more cash over the next several years than the entire company costs to buy today. You're betting the borrowers still paying down private loans keep paying, and that the government-guaranteed loans, which taxpayers stand behind, wind down without a nasty surprise. Right now it is going well after a scare: the best quarter in more than a year, one quarter after a single charge swung the whole company to a loss. You pay about eleven times what it now earns, and less than half of what the company's own accounts say the leftover loans and cash are worth. Company reportSep 6 Capital One Financial Corporation COFThe bet you're really making is that owning Discover, one of only four card networks in America that runs its own payment rails, lets Capital One earn the merchant discount fee and the interest on the same card instead of paying Visa or Mastercard to move every transaction. You are betting it can migrate its own cardholders onto those Discover and PULSE rails and keep money it used to pay away. Right now it looks messy but is healing: buying Discover forced a one-time $4.3 billion loss in mid-2025 to pre-fund expected losses on the loans it acquired, yet adjusted profit last quarter ran 21% above forecasts. You pay about nine times next year's expected earnings, and 1.9 times the company's tangible net worth, the most it has fetched in almost any of the last twelve years and just under what rivals cost. Company reportSep 6