Big salary comes with huge challenges for Google’s new CEO
Earlier this month, Google’s two co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, announced they were stepping down from their positions of control at Alphabet, Google’s parent company.
We already knew that Google’s existing chief executive, Sundar Pichai, would be taking over from Page and Brin. What we didn’t know was how much he would be getting paid.
Now we do. And predictably, it’s a massive number. Pichai is set to earn US$240 million (about NZ$360m) in stock awards over the next three years if he hits all of his performance-related targets. That’s on top of his US$2m annual salary.
Wait. There’s more. If Alphabet outperforms the S&P 100 Index,
Pichai could receive an additional
US$90m in Alphabet stock. Pichai, who grew up in India and joined Google in 2004, made his mark at the company after working on some of the company’s most successful non-search products, including Gmail, Chrome and Android.
However, Pichai was kept out of the limelight until 2015, when cofounders Page and Brin created parent company Alphabet and put Pichai in charge of Google services – the money-making wing of the company.
Pichai has received several bigvalue stock grants over the past decade. His first big payment came in 2014 when he received a
US$240m stock grant. This was followed by a brace of US$300m stock grants in the following years.
The news that the new chief executive could make a quarter of a billion US dollars over the next three years will do little to cool the with several high-profile workerrelated issues.
Earlier this year, it was revealed Google had more temporary workers than fulltime employees –
121,000 temps and contractors and
102,000 fulltimers.
While most sit in the same offices as Google employees and often do similar work, they usually make less money, have significantly worse benefit plans and don’t have the same rights as a fulltime employee.
There was also a global walkout of tens of thousands of Google employees. The walkout was protesting the handling of sexual misconduct at the company after it was revealed the sexual misconduct allegations against Google’s Android software creator, Andy Rubin, who left the company with a US$90m severance package.
The pressure will no doubt be on the new, high-earning, boss to fix these ugly issues.
The news that the new chief executive could make a quarter of a billion US dollars over the next three years will do little to cool the tensions regarding how Google and Alphabet pays its contractors.
tensions regarding how Google and Alphabet pays its contractors. Currently, Google is dealing