Sundar Pichai’s new salary package could be worth $692 million. Alphabet has signed Google’s CEO to a three-year deal that could make him one of the highest-paid executives on the planet, but much of it is tied to performance, including stock incentives related to Waymo and the company’s drone delivery venture Wing, according to filings first seen by the FT.
What’s surprising is that Pichai has received less public attention than Google’s founders. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the second and fourth richest people in the world, recently made headlines for entirely different reasons. The companies are buying luxury real estate in Miami in what is widely seen as a response to California’s Billionaire Tax Act, a voting system for the state’s roughly 200 billionaires that imposes a one-time 5% tax on those with a net worth of more than $1 billion. Page reportedly recently spent more than $173 million on two mansions in Coconut Grove, Florida, while Bryn has previously purchased two properties totaling $92 million and reportedly just bought a $51 million mansion 14 miles away.
In contrast, Mr. Pichai, as far as the public knows, has quietly remained rooted in Los Altos, California. He is also a billionaire. Since he took over the leadership team in 2015, Google’s market capitalization has grown nearly seven times, making the shares he accumulated in the process extremely valuable. He and his wife now own nearly $500 million in stock, with an estimated $650 million more sold as of last summer, according to Bloomberg calculations.
