Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet Inc., is about to reach a rare milestone for a technology executive who isn't a founder: a ten-figure fortune.
Since Pichai, 51, became CEO of Google in 2015, the stock has risen more than 400%, significantly outperforming the S&P 500 and Nasdaq over the same period. It hit a new record on Friday after the company's first-quarter profit beat expectations, boosted by AI-driven growth in its cloud computing unit. It also introduced a dividend for the first time in its history.
That rally, in addition to the hefty stock awards that have made him one of the highest-paid executives in the world, has boosted Pichai's fortune to nearly $1 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
A Google spokesperson declined to comment.
It's a remarkable rise for the native of Chennai, India, who grew up in a two-bedroom apartment where he and his younger brother slept on the living room floor. For much of his childhood, the Pichais had no television or car, he says in interviews. Sometimes they didn't even have running water.
The family got their first rotary phone when he was 12, which he says introduced him to the conveniences of technology. That, along with a healthy curiosity about his father's job as an electrical engineer for British conglomerate GEC, drew the young Pichai to the technology industry.
He excelled at school and eventually got a place at the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology in Kharagpur, where he studied engineering. When he won a scholarship to Stanford University, his father drew $1,000 from the family's savings – more than his annual salary – to cover the cost of Pichai's plane ticket and other expenses.
“My father and mother did what many parents did at the time,” Pichai said in a 2014 interview. “They sacrificed a large part of their lives and used a large part of their disposable income to ensure that their children received an education. “
After earning an advanced degree from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and a stint as a consultant at McKinsey, he joined Google in 2004 as a product manager, where he led the development of major projects such as the Google Toolbar and Google Chrome.
'Great facilitator'
Pichai's humility and ability to build consensus emerged early, says Keval Desai, who worked with him during his early years at Google.
“He doesn't want to be the most dominant voice,” says Desai, who is now the founder and managing director of Shakti, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm. “He is very comfortable in his own skin. This allowed him to be a great facilitator for these strong, strong-willed people from a very early age.”
Pichai was selected as CEO of Google by co-founder Larry Page in 2015, while Page became CEO of the newly created holding company Alphabet. Pichai also took over that role in 2019 when Page and co-founder Sergey Brin – two of the 10 richest people in the world according to Bloomberg's wealth index – withdrew from day-to-day management.
“There is no one we have relied on more since Alphabet was founded, and no better person to lead Google and Alphabet into the future,” Brin and Page, who have a combined net worth of nearly $300 billion, said of Pichai in a Letter from 2019.
In his time as CEO, Pichai has overseen a major expansion of the company's product line with the addition of Google Assistant, Google Home, Google Pixel, Google Workspace and more. He was also an early adopter of artificial intelligence, calling it a “once-in-a-generation opportunity.”
While Alphabet has been criticized for its AI offerings and some investors have questioned its ability to compete with OpenAI, last week's earnings provided assurance that spending on the technology is starting to pay off.
Pichai's net worth includes $424 million in current stock ownership and approximately $600 million from stock sales since he became CEO. Bloomberg's wealth index assumes these sales were taxed and reinvested in the stock market.
Pichai's status as a near-billionaire is a reminder of the value he created during his time at the helm of Google, Desai said.
“What it says to me is, first and foremost, he did the right thing by the shareholders,” Desai said. “He has benefited because Google shares have done very well.”
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