- Alphabet Inc. said Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai received $281 million in compensation last year, making him one of the highest-paid executives in the world.
In a regulatory filing, Alphabet Inc. said Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai received $281 million in compensation last year, making him one of the highest-paid executives in the world.
The vast majority of the package is equity incentives, some of which would be paid out in comparison to other firms in the S&P 100 index based on the equity return of the Alphabet. That means that his haul can be considerably smaller, or much larger. Pichai’s annual compensation in 2019 was $650,000, according to a proxy statement that was filed Friday with regulators. The company said this year it would be raised to $2 million.
The CEO’s salary is 1.085 times Alphabet workers’ median overall salaries, the company also said in the filing.
At the end of last year, Pichai took over from Larry Page as CEO of Alphabet as Page and co-founder Sergey Brin stepped away from the venture. Today, the executive of 47 would need to manage the alphabet through the coronavirus epidemic and economic recession. For the year, Pichai has already dramatically cut back on recruiting and investment plans.
This year, the board of the Alphabet modified the businesses it refers to as it determines whether the compensation will be calculated. Although dropping HP Inc. and Qualcomm Inc., it added Netflix Inc., Comcast Corp., and Salesforce.com Inc. Included on the list: Apple Inc., Amazon.com Inc., and Facebook Inc. Google included announced David Drummond’s wife’s salary.
In September, Axios announced that Drummond, at the time the company’s chief legal officer, married another Google employee who once worked in his legal department. Drummond’s spouse was paid out in 2019 for around $197,000, the filing said. Earlier this year Drummond stood down.
Recently, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said Google would cut back some of its investments over the rest of the year in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis, beginning with recruiting. At the time, however, Pichai only said that it would recalibrate the recruiting “key non-business marketing” and “significantly slow down.” Such severe budget cuts or hiring freezes were not reported.
“As with the financial crisis of 2008, the entire global economy is struggling and Google and Alphabet are not resistant to the impact of this economic pandemic,” CEO Sundar Pichai said last week in a memo sent to workers. “We live in an environment of alliances and interconnected companies, all of whom experience immense pain.”
