You may not know him by his name just yet, but he is one of the most powerful man alive. Google’s new CEO, Sundar Pichai wants to bring the internet to the rest of the world, all while winning back your trust.
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.
“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.”
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.
