Alphabet CEO took home $220m in 2022: nice work if you can get it
Sundar Pichai, the chief executive of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, remains one of America’s best paid CEOs. He was compensated a total of $220 million in 2022 – and that doesn’t even include the vast sum spent on his security expenses.
Image by REUTERS/Denis Balibouse/File Photo
Sundar Pichai, the chief executive of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, remains one of America’s best paid CEOs. He was compensated a total of $220 million in 2022 – and that doesn’t even include the vast sum spent on his security expenses.
Filings published late last week show Pichai was awarded a big chunk of shares worth more than $218 million last year. His base annual salary of $2 million hasn’t moved since 2020, and besides that Alphabet allocated almost $6 million towards Pichai’s personal security.
Other Alphabet executives, including Prabhakar Raghavan, senior vice president of Google’s knowledge and information, and chief business officer Philipp Schindler both made around $37 million. They’re also awarded shares every year.
Pichai, 50, has been the CEO of Alphabet since December 2019, and of Google since October 2015. Since joining Google in 2004, he has led product and engineering for Google’s products and platforms, including Search, Chrome, Maps, Android, Gmail, and Google Apps (now Google Workspace).
In the filings, the company says that as CEO, Pichai has shifted the company’s strategy to focus on AI, “which is now powering advances in the company’s founding product, Search.” In March, Alphabet rolled out its chatbot Bard, which is supposed to rival the popular ChatGPT bot, created by Microsoft-backed startup OpenAI.
Of course, the timing is a bit awkward. Just like other tech giants such as Meta or Amazon, Alphabet has been cutting jobs lately – in January alone, the company let 12,000 people go.
Pichai took full responsibility for the decisions “that led us here.” He wrote in a memo to employees: “Over the past two years we've seen periods of dramatic growth. To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today."
Alphabet has also gotten rid of several perks for employees – there are fewer free snacks, for example. Moreover, fewer employees will be promoted to higher positions in 2023 compared to previous years.
As Cybernews reported early this year, tech giants like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google began slashing jobs after going on a hiring spree during the coronavirus pandemic.
That saw them add hundreds of thousands of employees to their ranks, but by September 2022 these same companies were forced to make deep cuts to their workforce as the economic realities of higher interest rates, inflation, and recession fears took hold.
Layoffs.fyi, a website that’s been monitoring tech firings since March 2020, has compiled data indicating that approximately 174,000 employees have been let go by around 600 tech companies since the beginning of this year.
It remains to be seen whether Pichai will follow in the footsteps of Apple CEO Tim Cook, who asked to have his pay cut for 2023. According to a filing by Apple with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, Cook's target total compensation for 2023 will be $49 million, more than 40% below what he was paid in 2022.