Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai saw his total pay increase by $226 million last year, thanks to a huge stock award that made him one of America’s highest-paid business leaders for the year.
The news of the stock award, which Google’s parent company gives to its CEO once every three years and was worth $218 million, follows the company’s move to cut jobs across the board earlier this year due to the sharp advertising downturn. follows. At the time, Pichai told employees that senior executives would receive lower bonuses as part of the cost-cutting.
Alphabet’s latest executive pay arrangement, which was finalized in December ahead of the job cuts, shows little impact from the downturn. In the only direct impact on pay, Alphabet said it had halved the value of a special class of executive bonuses linked to ESG (environmental, social and governance) goals due to “macroeconomic conditions”. The cuts left the company’s most senior executives with $775,000 less in salary for 2022.
Many US companies have yet to disclose how much their leaders were paid last year, but only eight public company CEOs received packages of more than $226 million in 2021, according to a Federation of American Labor Unions report. According to an analysis by the AFL-CIO.
Pichai’s previous stock award, made in 2019, was valued at $277 million at the time. However, the company said the target price it established for its CEO’s latest stock compensation was the same as his 2019 award. The valuation reported in its official filing depends on a number of factors designed to estimate the final value, such as volatility in its share price.
The Alphabet boss’s 2022 pay package could eventually be much higher than the figure cited in the latest filing. The number of shares that will vest over the three-year period of the stock grant will partly depend on Alphabet’s performance, which the company said is now a big factor in its CEO’s pay.
The value will also depend heavily on the volatility of Alphabet’s share price. Under a new rule adopted by the Securities and Exchange Commission last year, US companies are required to disclose for the first time how much earlier stock awards were actually worth once they vested and executives took profits. Were of
New revelations have revealed that Pichai’s 2019 stock package netted him $504 million over the next three years, far more than the company was valued at when it was first awarded.
In addition to the triennial stock award, the Google CEO receives an annual salary of $2mn and a payment to cover his personal security, up from $5mn in 2022. In recent years, when he hasn’t received a stock award, Pichai’s security costs have made up more than two-thirds of his annual compensation.
