Google CEO Sundar Pichai becomes the most expensive tech CEO
Sundar Pichai, the Indian-American Google CEO, has had a great year with 2019 presenting him with a giant pay raise.
Pichai was recently appointed as CEO of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, in addition to his existing responsibilities at Google. In his new role, Pichai will receive $2 million in annual base salary starting next year, a company filing recently revealed.
As CEO of Alphabet, Pichai will oversee about 30 specialised tech subsidiaries in addition to Google, including self-driving unit Waymo and AI lab DeepMind.
Also starting 2020, Pichai will receive a hefty $240 million in performance-based stock awards over the next three years, the largest award package Google has granted any executive.
A materials engineer educated in India and the U.S., Pichai joined Google in 2004 as a member of its management team. He worked his way up to CEO in 2015. In his first year as Google chief, Pichai earned a base salary of $652,500. His total compensation skyrocketed the following year when Google approved a $199 million stock award package for him, the largest in the company’s history at the time.
In addition to net paycheck, Google also spends generously to keep its CEO safe. Last year, Google recorded a $1.2 million expense under an account called “CEO personal security allowance,” which covered Pichai’s day-to-day security costs, use of company private jets and so on.
Pichai’s Alphabet compensation package is an infinite jump from what his predecessor, Google cofounder Larry Page, earned in the same role: $1.
It was a common practice among tech entrepreneurs during Page’s time to pay themselves a nominal salary and store most of their fortune in company stock to show their commitment to shareholders. Other notable CEOs who earn a $1 base salary include Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter’s Jack Dorsey and Oracle’s Larry Ellison.
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