Nobody Explained the Revolut Story. Let Me Try.

LinkedIn spent most of this week discussing Nik Storonsky's proposed pay package. Revolut hits $500 billion in valuation, Storonsky gets an enormous share award. Exciting. Historic. The Musk model comes to Europe. Everyone had a take. Nobody explained how it actually works. So let me do that.

First: what is Revolut actually worth right now?

Revolut's most recent secondary market transaction valued the company at $115 billion. The company generated approximately $1.7 billion in net profit in 2025. Divide $115 billion by $1.7 billion and you get a Price-to-Earnings ratio of roughly 67. A P/E ratio tells you how many years of current profit it would take to justify the current price if nothing changed. At 67x, you are paying 67 years of today's earnings for Revolut. For context:

• JPMorgan Chase, the world's largest bank by market cap, trades at approximately 16x earnings. It generated $57 billion in net profit in 2025 and is valued at around $950 billion.
• Traditional European banks trade at 8-12x.
• Apple trades at around 30-35x.
• Revolut trades at 67x.

Revolut is not being priced as a bank. It is being priced as a software company that happens to hold a banking licence. Investors are not buying today's earnings. They are buying the earnings they expect Revolut to generate in five years. That is a bet, not a valuation. It may turn out to be correct. It is still a bet.

Now: the $500 billion target

Storonsky wants a new share award that kicks in if Revolut reaches a $500 billion valuation. Let's check that number. JPMorgan earns $57 billion per year and is worth $950 billion — roughly 16x earnings. If we apply that same multiple to Revolut, the company would need to generate approximately $30 billion in annual profit to justify a $500 billion valuation. Revolut currently generates $1.7 billion. That means the company needs to grow its profit by roughly 17 times from where it is today. That is not impossible — Revolut is growing fast, the banking sector is genuinely being disrupted, and the company has a product that works. But it is not a near-term number. It is a decade-long ambition compressed into a compensation structure. Storonsky is not asking to be paid for what Revolut is. He is asking to be paid if Revolut becomes something entirely different from what it is today.

The mechanism: how does his stake go from 29% to 40%?

This is the part nobody explained. Storonsky currently owns approximately 29% of Revolut. Under the existing deal, if Revolut reaches a $200 billion valuation at IPO, his stake increases to 40%. Under the proposed new deal, additional awards would kick in at the $500 billion mark. His percentage does not increase by taking shares away from other shareholders. It increases through dilution. Here is how dilution works. Imagine a pizza cut into 100 slices. Storonsky owns 29 slices. The other investors own 71 slices. Now the company creates 20 new slices and gives them to Storonsky as his award. The pizza now has 120 slices. Storonsky has 49 slices out of 120 — roughly 40%. The other investors still have their 71 slices. But those 71 slices now represent a smaller percentage of the total pizza. Their ownership percentage went down. This is dilution. Why would investors accept this? Because the size of the pizza changes too. If Revolut is worth $115 billion today, a 71% stake is worth approximately $82 billion. If the company reaches $500 billion, a 60% stake — after Storonsky's award dilutes them from 71% to 60% — is worth $300 billion. The percentage goes down. The absolute value goes up by 3.6x. Investors who accept the dilution are betting that Storonsky's incentive to reach that target will make the dilution worthwhile. This is exactly how Elon Musk's Tesla pay package worked. It is why the Financial Times drew the comparison. And it is why Delaware courts rejected Musk's package twice — the process, not the concept, was the problem.

The Musk comparison and why it matters for Europe

What Storonsky is attempting is culturally unusual in Europe. American founder compensation operates on the logic that the person most responsible for creating the value should capture a significant portion of it. If you build a trillion-dollar company, you should get a hundred billion dollars. The incentive alignment is crude but legible. European corporate culture has historically been more compressed. Founders do well. They do not typically negotiate pay packages that could make them one of the ten wealthiest people on earth if the bet lands. Storonsky is Russian-born, built the company in London, and recently relocated to Dubai. He is not operating within the implicit norms of European founder culture. He is applying American logic to a European company that happens to have institutional investors who are also, largely, American. Whether that is appropriate or not is a separate question. What matters for anyone watching from Malta is that the architecture of the deal — performance-linked dilution, uncapped upside, valuation milestones — is increasingly how serious technology companies structure founder compensation. If Malta wants to attract founders building at this scale, the question of whether local corporate structures can accommodate this kind of arrangement is not hypothetical.

The Revolut-Malta context

Revolut is not an abstract company for Malta. It is the payment infrastructure for a significant portion of the island's iGaming industry, one of the most widely used financial apps among Malta's expatriate and nomadic population, and a company that has been building out its business banking product — Revolut Business — aggressively in the markets where Malta-registered companies operate. The company's full financial history, growth trajectory and IPO timeline are tracked in the FreeMalta Garage. What is relevant here is that the $500 billion target is not just a pay negotiation. It is a signal about where the company intends to go. A company that sets $500 billion as its incentive horizon is not planning to be a European neobank. It is planning to be JPMorgan. Whether the math supports that is, as we have established, a separate question.

The number that nobody mentioned

One more thing. Revolut's OpenAI partnership — the ChatGPT Go integration announced earlier this year — is not in any of the $500 billion coverage. Neither is the US banking licence the company is waiting for, which would open the largest retail banking market in the world. The deal Storonsky is negotiating is not based on what Revolut is. It is based on what it could become if three or four very large bets land simultaneously. That may happen. It may not. Off The Record ran a piece earlier this year on Revolut's seven-year zero-marketing growth — the piece that explains how the company got here without spending what every other bank spends. The answer to how Revolut gets from $115 billion to $500 billion probably looks more like that story than the F/K ratio does. But the F/K ratio is where you start. And nobody on LinkedIn started there. Now you have.