CEO of Alphabet, Sundar Pichai, earned more than $200 million in 2022 amid cost cutting

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet Inc (GOOGL.O), received a total salary of roughly $226 million in 2022, more than 800 times the typical employee’s pay, the firm said in a regulatory filing on Friday. According to the filing, Pichai’s pay includes approximately $218 million in stock awards.

The salary disparity comes at a time when Alphabet, Google’s parent company, has been reducing positions globally. In January, the Mountain View, California-based business revealed intentions to lose 12,000 jobs globally, equivalent to 6% of its global workforce.

Earlier this month, hundreds of Google employees walked out of the company’s London offices in protest over layoffs.

Google employees staged a walkout in March at the company’s Zurich headquarters after more than 200 workers were laid off.

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.”

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.