Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google Parent Alphabet Inc, has received a total compensation of about $226 million in 2022, according to the company's securities filing on Friday. The compensation includes stock awards of about $218 million and a basic salary of $2.0 million.


He received a total of $6.3 million in compensation in 2021 when he didn’t receive the grant. While in 2019 the executive received $281 million.


Pichai's stock award is paid every three years.




As part of his compensation package, Alphabet spent $5.94 million on personal security for Pichai, which according to Reuters is more than 800 times a median Alphabet employee gets as salary.

 

The salary gap emerges at a time when Alphabet, the parent company of Google, is laying off workers all over the world. The California-based firm proposed to cut 12,000 jobs globally in January, which would represent 6 per cent of its total staff.



In March, Google employees staged a walkout at the company's Zurich offices after more than 200 workers were laid off, the report said. 


In 2022, Pichai's compensation pushed him far ahead of other Alphabet leaders. Both Philipp Schindler, chief business officer, and Prabhakar Raghavan, senior vice president of Google's knowledge and information, made roughly $37 million each. Ruth Porat, the chief financial officer, received $24.5 million in pay. 


However, it should be noted that there was no increase in Pichai's basic pay, while other senior executives' salary was increased.


The securities filing said, "Effective January 2022, the Compensation Committee increased the annual salaries of Ruth, Prabhakar, Philipp, and Kent from $650,000 to $1.0 million. We last adjusted senior executive base salaries (excluding Sundar) in January 2011, and the increases were intended to align with market compensation trends during that time period. Sundar’s base salary remained at $2.0 million."


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Explaining the rationale behind the compensation hike, Alphabet Inc said, "The Compensation Committee currently follows a triennial grant cadence for CEO equity awards. Sundar’s last equity award was granted in December 2019, and fully vested at the end of December 2022. In December 2022, the Compensation Committee granted a new equity award to Sundar to recognize his strong performance as our CEO."


Alphabet uses a combination of GSUs and performance stock units (PSUs) to award Compensation to executive officers


"As with the 2019 award, the 2022 award consisted of both GSUs and PSUs. The on-target value of the award was unchanged from the 2019 award. However, relative to the 2019 award, the Compensation Committee made two design changes such that more of the award’s vesting is dependent on performance: (1) increased the proportion of PSUs to 60 per cent of the total award from 43 per cent; and (2) increased the performance requirement for on-target PSU payout to the 55th percentile from the 50th percentile of Alphabet’s relative total shareholder return (TSR). These changes further align Sundar’s compensation to long-term shareholder value creation and Alphabet’s stock performance relative to the S&P 100 over the applicable performance periods," the company said. 


Sundar Pichai, 50, has been the Chief Executive Officer of Alphabet since December 2019 and of Google since October 2015. Since joining Google in 2004, Sundar has led product and engineering for Google’s products and platforms, including Search, Chrome, Maps, Android, Gmail, and Google Apps (now Google Workspace). Sundar served as Google’s Senior Vice President of Products from October 2014 to October 2015, and as Google’s Senior Vice President of Android, Chrome, and Apps from March 2013 to October 2014.