Sundar Pichai’s new salary package could be worth $692 million. Alphabet has signed a three-year deal that will make Google’s CEO one of the highest-paid executives on the planet, according to documents first seen by the FT. But most of it has to do with performance, including new stock incentives tied to drone delivery ventures Waymo and Wing.
What’s surprising is that, compared to Google’s founders, Pichai attracts very little public attention. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the second and fourth richest people in the world, recently made headlines for completely different reasons. Both men have been buying up luxury properties in Miami, widely seen as a response to California’s proposed Billionaire Tax Act. The bill is a ballot initiative that would impose a one-time 5% levy on the state’s roughly 200 billionaires on net worth exceeding $1 billion. Page recently reportedly spent more than $173 million on two mansions in Coconut Grove, Florida, while Brin was linked to a $51 million mansion 14 miles away, with her two previous purchases totaling $92 million.
Pichai, by contrast, has quietly kept his roots in Los Altos, California, as far as the public knows. He is also a billionaire. Since he took over as CEO in 2015, Google’s market capitalization has grown nearly sevenfold, boosting the value of the stock he has amassed significantly. He and his wife now own about $500 million worth of stock, according to Bloomberg calculations, and are estimated to have sold about $650 million more as of last summer.
