Google CEO was paid $100 million last year. Casual.
It's good to be Sundar Pichai.
Pichai, the India-born computer engineer who rose through the ranks to become the CEO of Google last year, is now getting the kind of pay that would make the biggest names in business jealous.
The Google CEO received $100.5 million in total compensation for 2015, according to a company filing on Tuesday.
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The vast majority of that pay package, $99.82 million, will vest in 2017. Pichai's baseline salary for the year was $652,500.
To put that into perspective: the average compensation for CEOs of the 350 largest firms in the U.S. in 2014 was $16.3 million, according to data last year from the Economic Policy Institute.
In total, Google -- or, really, its parent company Alphabet -- have doled out more than $600 million in stock options to Pichai that vest at various intervals over the coming years, according to data crunched by Bloomberg.
The goal is presumably to ensure he sticks around for the long term.
Pichai, a longtime Google executive who previously ran the Chrome and Android businesses, has been described by colleagues we spoke with as "the better day-to-day CEO" compared to his predecessor and Google cofounder Larry Page.
In August, Page announced plans to restructure the Internet giant by splitting up Google into various standalone businesses, including venture capital arms, smart home devices, life science efforts and, of course, Google itself, all under the umbrella of a new holding company called Alphabet.
Page took the new title of CEO of Alphabet, effectively freeing him up from day-to-day responsibilities and creating a new opportunity for Pichai to take the top spot at Google.
“I’m very fortunate,” Pichai told BuzzFeed in a profile published this week, in response to a question about his previously reported lavish stock options. “I take that as an opportunity to figure out thoughtfully how I give back to the world.”
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Topics Google
Seth Fiegerman was a Senior Business Reporter at Mashable, where he covered startups, marketing and the latest consumer tech trends. He joined Mashable in August 2012 and is based in New York.Before joining Mashable, Seth covered all things Apple as a reporter at Silicon Alley Insider, the tech section of Business Insider. He has also worked as a staff writer at TheStreet.com and as an editor at Playboy Magazine. His work has appeared in Newsweek, NPR, Kiplinger, Portfolio and The Huffington Post.Seth received his Bachelor of Arts from New York University, where he majored in journalism and philosophy.In his spare time, Seth enjoys bike riding around Brooklyn and writing really bad folk songs.
