Google just gave Sundar Pichai a $692M pay package

varispeed

Regular IT workers should be grateful they earn substantially more than a teacher or a nurse /s. The fact that labour cost is disconnected from the value it generates is probably one of the greatest scams pulled on working class. 99% of his pay packet should be redistributed among workers.

petcat

Isn't Google a trillion dollar company going gangbusters toward its next trillion dollars?

crop_rotation

Pichai has been a very poor CEO but Google's position was so strong that it is still doing fine. I am sure he is in the founder's good graces so as long as the company's stock takes a big dive he is gonna stay at the helm and keep raking in the big bucks.

spwa4

So what's the reason? Another massive layoff coming up for Google?

brcmthrowaway

Is this the highest paid CEO anywhere (bar Elon)?

laborcontract

Can we please, please move past this generation of bean-counter CEOs. Google and Apple have done great things under Pichai and Cook, and yet I couldn't been less excited for what either is doing. Bring back experimental culture.

jcheng

Details: $2MM/year in salary, the rest in performance based incentives. The $692MM figure is based on hitting all of the maximums (200% of a few different targets) and is the total for three years.

shevy-java

Evil pays well. We need to find alternatives to Google - that giant is out of control now.

kkfx

I honestly have NOTHING against that: they are a private company, their money, their choice. I have plenty of other bones to pick with them, regarding the harvesting of personal data from smart devices and cloud services, how it's used, and so on, but the salaries of their executives are their own money, so it's their business and I don't see any reason for controversy. In fact, if they happen to lose talents because of their policies or ruin themselves over certain massive salaries, that's their problem, all the better. Unfortunately, most people seem incapable of attacking what actually needs to be attacked, instead of getting hung up on things that are perfectly legitimate.

amelius

There's a strong smell coming out of that wealth gap now.

BeetleB

At least the article mentions that it is contingent on bonus targets. All too often articles skip that and say "Y was paid $$$". Notably, go look at Intel's Pat Gelsinger. Prior to his firing, lots of articles talking about how he was one of the highest paid CEOs (citing numbers in excess of $150M). They'd fail to mention that it was over several years and only if he met targets. Well, he didn't meet those targets. His actual compensation was about $10M/year.

delichon

More than an order of magnitude smaller than Tesla's deal with their CEO.

y0ssar1an

absolutely no one is smart or productive enough to justify $692m in pay. they could hire thousands of engineers for that money.

option

Google should fire Sundar and make Denis CEO

SilverElfin

Google has substantially caught up on AI and between their existing monopolies, capital, access to data, and ability to sell to existing cloud or Google apps customers, they’re going to become richer and more powerful than ever. This type of concentration makes it so that there’s no working competition element to the economy. Mega corps should be broken up and also charged absurdly high tax rates to fix this.

fancyfredbot

Is this what motivates Sundar Pichai to work harder for Google? More money? Surely there's nothing he could want that he doesn't already have. I understand it's insulting to be paid less than other CEOs, and I get that it's a way of keeping score. All the same I think he's doing it for the power, the respect, the fame. Would he have walked away if the number was only $100m? Would that have been rational?

tsoukase

Companies structure is much more monarchic than almost all regimes in history. CEOs stand in the top position like Gods, having full power at will, and then all the others follow as his workers. He can easily earn multiple times more than the next highest in the company because his responsibility is elevated. So, the company can afford to pay huge sum to one person because he is the only one that is able to bring in multiples of this (eg fire people, increase the stock price, prepare for a sale off). Companies are not democracies, not even monarchies, they are machines with a single brain for strategy: the CEO's.

returnInfinity

Sergey said that Google was able to rapidly respond to ChatGPT because Sundar had already invested a lot into AI. They have the people, the models and the chips. And Sundar helped achieve that. That's what he said on some podcast.