Why Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai’s salary is a touchy topic in tech world
- In 2022, Sundar Pichai took away a whopping $226 million in compensation, which included $218 million in stock awards
Sundar Pichai, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Alphabet is one of the most highly compensated professionals in the world. In 2022, the 50-year-old tech leader took away a whopping $226 million in compensation, which included $218 million in stock awards. Sundar Pichai's salary is a sensitive topic in the tech world which is reeling under massive layoffs and cost cutting.
In January, Sundar Pichai announced that in order to cut costs following the company's largest round of layoffs, top executives would receive reduced bonuses. The company's finance chief also warned employees last month that more spending cuts should be expected. According to a filing made on Friday, Sundar Pichai's annual salary for 2020-2022 was $2 million.
The amount of the compensation assumes significance as recently Google laid off around 12,000 employees globally in broad cost-cutting measures. The number of employees laid-off amounts to 6% of the total workforce.
Not just layoffs, the tech giant has also reduced several other facilities for the employees like free snacks, gym facility, staplers, laptops, etc. In addition, Google also informed its employees via email that fewer of them will be promoted to higher seniority levels this year compared to previous years.
With so many people out of their jobs and employees working with reduced facilities, the huge amount for compensation for the CEO has certainly raised many eyebrows, with questions around the relevance of cost-cutting measures.
The development comes at a time when Google is entering new domains like generative artificial intelligence (AI) and is looking forwards to competing with Microsoft-backed OpenAI's ChatGPT. Recently, the tech giant also announced combining its two AI initiative- Google Brain and DeepMind.
Alphabet has announced that the teams being merged have successfully completed several noteworthy projects, such as the transformer technology which served as the foundation for some of OpenAI's projects.
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First Published:23 Apr 2023, 06:12 PM IST
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