Google CEO Sundar Pichai nears billionaire status powered by AI boom

By Vernal Galpotthawela, Julia Love and Davey Alba

Alphabet Inc. Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai is on the cusp of achieving a rare milestone for a non-founder tech executive: a 10-figure fortune.

 

Since Pichai, 51, became CEO of Google in 2015, the stock has surged more than 400%, significantly outperforming the S&P 500 and Nasdaq over the same period. It hit a fresh record Friday after the company’s first-quarter earnings beat expectations, boosted by AI-driven growth in its cloud computing unit. It also introduced a dividend for the first time in its history. 

That rally, alongside hefty stock awards that have made him one of the world’s highest-paid executives, has boosted Pichai’s fortune to nearly $1 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. 

A Google spokesperson declined to comment.

It’s a remarkable rise for the native of Chennai, India, who grew up in a two-room apartment where he and his younger brother slept on the living-room floor. During much of his childhood, the Pichais didn’t have a television or a car, he has said in interviews. At times, they didn’t even have running water. 

The family got their first rotary telephone when he was 12, which he said introduced him to the conveniences of technology. That, along with a healthy curiosity about his father’s job as an electrical engineer for the British conglomerate GEC, attracted the young Pichai to the tech industry.

He excelled at school, eventually landing a spot at the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology in Kharagpur, where he studied engineering. When he won a scholarship to Stanford University, his father withdrew $1,000 from the family’s savings — more than his annual salary — to cover the cost of Pichai’s plane ticket and other expenses. 

“My dad and mom did what a lot of parents did at the time,” Pichai said in a 2014 interview. “They sacrificed a lot of their life and used a lot of their disposable income to make sure their children were educated.”

After earning another advanced degree at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and a stint as a consultant at McKinsey, he joined Google in 2004 as a product manager, leading development of major projects like the Google Toolbar and Google Chrome.

‘Great Facilitator’

Pichai’s humility and ability to build consensus emerged early on, said Keval Desai, who worked with him during his first years at Google.  

“He’s not looking to be the most dominant voice,” said Desai, who is now a founder and managing director at Shakti, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm. “He’s very comfortable in his own skin. It allowed him very early on to be a great facilitator across these strong, opinionated people.”

Pichai was selected in 2015 by co-founder Larry Page to be Google’s CEO, while Page became CEO of newly formed holding company Alphabet. Pichai took over that role as well in 2019 when Page and co-founder Sergey Brin — two of the 10 richest people in the world, according to Bloomberg’s wealth index — stepped back from day-to-day management. 

“There is no one that we have relied on more since Alphabet was founded, and no better person to lead Google and Alphabet into the future,” Brin and Page, who combined have a net worth of almost $300 billion, said of Pichai in a 2019 letter.

In his time as CEO, Pichai has overseen a major expansion of the company’s product line with the addition of Google Assistant, Google Home, Google Pixel, Google Workspace and more. He was also an early adopter of artificial intelligence, calling it a “once-in-a-generation opportunity.” 

While Alphabet has been criticized for its AI offerings and some investors have questioned its ability to compete with OpenAI, last week’s earnings provided reassurance that its spending on the technology is starting to pay off.

Pichai’s net worth includes $424 million in current share holdings as well as roughly $600 million from share sales since he became CEO. Bloomberg’s wealth index assumes those sales were taxed and reinvested in the stock market. 

Pichai’s status as a near-billionaire is a reminder of the value that he has created during his time at the helm of Google, Desai said. 

“What it says to me is first and foremost that he has done right by shareholders,” Desai said. “He’s benefited because Google’s stock has done really well.”

First Published: Apr 30 2024 | 5:31 PM IST