Mountain View, California— According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Alphabet and Google, is now a billionaire. His net worth is estimated to be $1.1 billion. This milestone comes as Alphabet, Google’s parent firm, had its market value rise by more than $1 trillion since 2023, giving investors an amazing 120% return. Alphabet’s stock price recently hit an all-time high, which is a huge financial success for Pichai.
As a non-founding CEO in the IT business, this is a big deal for Pichai. Pichai’s riches comes from his leadership and success in the executive suite, not from founding equity holdings in his firms like Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg or Nvidia’s Jensen Huang.
Pichai, who is 53 years old, is also known as the tech giant’s longest-serving CEO. He will have been in this position for 10 years in August. His leadership has helped Alphabet thrive, especially in its new operations. In August, Pichai gave an earnings update on X (previously Twitter) and talked about how much the firm has grown since he took over.
“Just got off the call on profits. It was our (and my) 40th call as Alphabet, and it was a great quarter. Ten years will have passed since we announced Alphabet in August. I’ve been thinking about how much our new businesses have grown since then, like Cloud, YouTube, Play, and Subscriptions. In 2015, Alphabet made $75 billion in sales, which gives you an idea of how far they’ve come. “YouTube and Cloud alone ended 2024 with an annual run rate of $110 billion,” Pichai stated. Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX, called the upgrade “impressive.” Pichai answered with a simple folded hands emoji.
From Small Beginnings to Leading the Tech World
Sundar Pichai grew up in a two-room flat in Tamil Nadu, India, where he was born into a middle-class family. He started on his path to becoming a worldwide IT leader when he got a scholarship to Stanford University in 1993. He joined Google in 2004 and worked his way up the ranks over the next ten years. Pichai was in charge of building Google’s Android business and was a key player in making the popular Chrome browser. In 2015, he became CEO of Google and in 2019, he became CEO of Alphabet.
Pichai’s new billionaire status shows how successful he is, yet he still doesn’t have a lot of money in Alphabet. He has a 0.02% economic share worth about $440 million. Most of his money is in cash and from selling stock awards he got during his time as CEO.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the co-founders of Alphabet, possess a significantly higher level of wealth compared to others. Page is worth about $171.2 billion, and Brin is worth about $160.4 billion, making them two of the richest people in the world. Pichai’s pay has mostly come from stock awards tied to his performance, which have greatly increased his total earnings over the years, including a $226 million package in 2022. His base salary is about $2 million a year, but most of his pay has come from these large stock grants, which show how important he is to the company’s growth and direction.