Zak Brown Pocketed $110 Million From McLaren in 2025
The team’s financial accounts reveal its CEO earned more than Norris and Piastri’s combined salaries — roughly double what its two champions took home together.
While Lando Norris was celebrating his first world championship and McLaren was cementing its status as a dominant force, another number was quietly growing in the team’s accounts: CEO Zak Brown’s compensation package topped $110 million in 2025 — a sum that places him among the best-paid executives on the planet, ahead of the chiefs of Microsoft and Apple.
Where the money comes from
Brown’s base salary rose from $7.78 million in 2024 to $10.84 million in 2025. The real number, though, comes from the team’s long-term incentive plan — a structure tied to revenue growth, debt control, profitability and liquidity, paid out in cash rather than equity. The combined effect: $99.25 million from bonuses alone, further boosted by MSP Sports Capital’s exit as a 33 percent shareholder in September, a deal that valued the team at more than $5 billion.
When MSP first invested, McLaren was valued at £560 million — the investor’s exit position marked a ten-times return.
The context that stings a little more
The team’s revenue jumped to $777.2 million in 2025, up from $645 million the year before — driven in part by the largest share of Formula 1’s prize pot off the back of the constructors’ title. And here’s the arithmetic that gives every driver pause: Norris, the new world champion, took home around $40 million between salary and bonuses. Piastri earned around $25 million. Combined, the two drivers cost McLaren roughly $65 million in 2025 — just over half what its own CEO earned.
Brown built the team’s recovery from near-collapse in 2020 to constructors’ dominance, and the financial filings make the case emphatically. The question of who actually wins championships — the drivers on track or the architects behind the desk — stays rhetorical, at least until the cheque arrives.
