Sundar Pichai is Google’s highest paid CEO
After Google had established its parent company, Alphabet, in October 2015, Indian Sundar Pichai assumed his position as the new Google CEO.
This made great news for India, the new hub of technological innovation. Pichai became the latest Indian to claim a massively high-profile job in the US technology industry. Microsoft’s Satya Nadella is the other notable example.
Pichai, 44 years, was born and schooled in Chennai, India. His father was a senior electrical engineer in the British Conglomerate General Electric, later he managed a factory that produced electrical components.
His childhood was not that luxurious, he grew up in a two-room apartment, where he did not have a room and slept on the living room floor, as did his younger brother. His family did not even own a television or a car.
Despite his poor life, his father managed to play up technology passion in Pichai’s mind.
“I used to come home and talk to him a lot about my work day and the challenges I faced,” Regunatha Pichai told Bloomberg, adding that Sundar had a remarkable talent for remembering telephone numbers.
He studied Metallurgical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kharagpur. According to one of his tutors, quoted in the Times of India, Pichai was the “brightest of his batch”.
After graduating from IIT Kharagpur, Pichai had the opportunity to achieve his American dream; he was offered a scholarship at Stanford University, the home of technology giants. His father’s total salary was less than the cost of the plane ticket to the US.
At the beginning of his career, Pichai worked in engineering and product management at Applied Materials and as a management consultant at McKinsey & Company, as of BBC.
After joining Google in 2004, many of its products saw the light under Pichai’s watch, including- Google’s web browser, Chrome, as well as, the Android mobile operating system.
At Google, he is described as a soft-spoken, very talented person, and well liked.
“Sundar has been saying the things I would have said (and sometimes better!) for quite some time now, and I’ve been tremendously enjoying our work together,” wrote Larry Page, one of Google’s co-founders, on his blog post announcing shifting CEO responsibilities to Pichai.
Earlier this month, Pichain was awarded $199m in shares, making him the highest paid Chief Executive in the US. According to BBC, he was awarded 273,328 Alphabet shares on 3 February, which is worth a total of $199m, according to a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
After the new award of shares, Pichai’s total stock value hit approximately $650m. Pichai’s share award will pass to him each quarter until 2019. Two weeks ago, Alphabet – Google’s parent company – overtook Apple as the world’s most valuable firm, for only one day, after it recorded a profit of $4.9bn in the fourth quarter last fiscal year, an increase from $4.7bn a year ago.
Google’s giant parent now possesses the highest value among American companies. Reportedly, Alphabet made a profit of $16.3bn annually, whereas Google’s operating income soared to $23.4bn, thanks to on line advertising increase.
The establishment of Alphabet was propelled with an aim to make the core Google Internet services business “cleaner and more accountable”, while allowing greater autonomy to group companies that work in businesses other than Internet services.
