Sundar Pichai image, via Open Domain
Google CEO Sundar Pichai is having quite a good week, after news emerged that his employers have awarded him around $199m in restricted stock.
Sundar Pichai has been running Google since last summer, when Alphabet was created as the umbrella above operations like Google, Google Ventures, Calico Google X, Fiber and Nest.
Since then, Google’s business has continued rocketing, with Pichai’s first share award – which come every two years at the company – coming in at an astounding $199m, according to Bloomberg.
That figure puts him top of the class when it comes to tech CEO incomes in the US, with Tim Cook’s remuneration in 2015, for example, coming in at around $67m in total.
Other leading tech CEOs like Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, Qualcomm’s Steve Mollenkopf and Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer are all thought to have incomes markedly less than Pichai’s figures, probably less than half, in fact.
Pichai received 273,328 Class C shares on 3 February that will vest in quarterly increments through to 2019 should he stay on as CEO.
Pichai rose up through the Google ranks thanks to him helping to lead Android to become the biggest mobile operating system on the planet, with it now installed on more than 80pc of mobile devices worldwide.
As we wrote upon his naming as Google’s new CEO last year, if you use Gmail, Chrome, Android, Search, ATAP or Google Drive, Pichai’s fingerprints are all over them.
As Pichai’s share award won’t be replicated for another two years, it means his Google income isn’t quite as far ahead of his peers as first seems – you would need to half the share value, to average it out – but he still comes in top of the pile.
His basic salary, too, has yet to be made public.
