At $226 Million, Sundar Pichai Earned 800 Times The Median Compensation Of Google Employees In 2022

Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google and its parent firm Alphabet, was awarded a total compensation valued at $226 million in 2022, according to a regulatory filing released by the firm last Friday.

This mammoth compensation includes stock awards valued at more than $200 million.

800 Times The Median Compensation Of Google Employees

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The median total compensation for Google parent Alphabet's employees was $279,802 in 2022, according to the filing, implying that CEO Pichai¡¯s compensation was 808 times that amount.

Someone making the $15.50 minimum wage in Alphabet¡¯s home state of California would have to work 14.6 million hours, or just over 7000 years (with 40 hour work weeks and no time off) to catch up with Pichai¡¯s 2022 salary.

CEO Pichai had said in January that top executives, including him would get lower bonuses as part of cost-cutting measures, following the largest round of layoffs in the company¡¯s history. Last month, Google¡¯s finance chief told employees to expect more spending cuts.

Amid the mass layoffs, global recession fears and economic uncertainty, this mammoth compensation was a big boost for CEO Pichai, who made just over $6 million in 2021 and $7.4 million in 2020. The rest of the compensation besides the stock awards reportedly came from a $2 million base salary and more than $5 million for a private security detail in 2022.

Pichai¡¯s stock boosts come every three years, in 2019 he received a similar package of $281 million, as per CNN.

In December 2022, the company granted a new triannual equity award to Pichai with a value of $210 million, according to a regulatory filing, consisting of both performance-based and time-based equity.

That grant contains two tranches of performance stock units with a target value of $63 million each, plus a grant of $84 million in the form of Alphabet¡¯s restricted stock units. Alphabet said in the filing that more of the latest stock award would be dependent on performance over time, increasing the proportion of performance stock units to 60% of the total from 43% in 2019, as per WSJ.

Also Read: What Google Employees Wrote In Their Open Letter To CEO Sundar Pichai

High Paychecks For Other Google Top Executives Too

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Other top executives at Google also received healthy paychecks in 2022, though nowhere near as huge as CEO Pichai¡¯s.

Prabhakar Raghavan, senior vice president of knowledge and information at Google and Philipp Schindler, Google¡¯s chief business officer, each made $37 million, as per the CNN report. Google and Alphabet CFO Ruth Porat and Kent Walker, chief legal officer, both made about $24.5 million.

Earlier this year, Tim Cook, the CEO of tech giant Apple--which is among the few tech giants that have not conducted mass layoffs in recent months--voluntarily cut his pay by 50% for this year amid cost-cutting.

Also Read: Explained: How Apple Has So Far Avoided Mass Layoffs

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