Google just gave Sundar Pichai a $692M pay package

2026-03-0818:37134179techcrunch.com

Most of it is tied to performance, including new stock incentives linked to Waymo and Wing, its drone delivery venture.

Sundar Pichai’s new pay package could be worth $692 million. Per a filing first spied by the FT, Alphabet has structured a three-year deal for its Google CEO that could make him one of the highest-paid executives on the planet — but most of it is tied to performance, including new stock incentives linked to Waymo and its drone delivery venture Wing.

What’s striking is how little public fascination Pichai attracts compared to Google’s founders. Larry Page and Sergey Brin — the second- and fourth-richest people in the world — have lately captured headlines for a different reason entirely.

Both have been snapping up lavish Miami properties, widely seen as a response to California’s proposed Billionaire Tax Act — a ballot initiative targeting the state’s roughly 200 billionaires with a one-time 5% levy on net worth exceeding $1 billion. Page reportedly spent over $173 million on two mansions in Coconut Grove, Florida, recently, while Brin was just linked to a $51 million megamansion 14 miles away, atop two earlier purchases totaling $92 million.

Pichai, by contrast, remains quietly rooted in Los Altos, California, as far as the public knows. He’s a billionaire, too — the nearly sevenfold growth in Google’s market cap since he took the helm in 2015 has made the stock he’s accumulated along the way hugely valuable. He and his wife currently hold shares worth nearly $500 million, with another estimated $650 million sold as of last summer, per Bloomberg’s calculations.


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Comments

  • By BeetleB 2026-03-0819:212 reply

    At least the article mentions that it is contingent on bonus targets. All too often articles skip that and say "Y was paid $$$".

    Notably, go look at Intel's Pat Gelsinger. Prior to his firing, lots of articles talking about how he was one of the highest paid CEOs (citing numbers in excess of $150M). They'd fail to mention that it was over several years and only if he met targets.

    Well, he didn't meet those targets. His actual compensation was about $10M/year.

    • By bombcar 2026-03-0819:235 reply

      I'm willing to fail as Intel's CEO for the low, low cost of $5m/year, and I can get it done in a year.

      • By computomatic 2026-03-0819:302 reply

        Sorry, we’re only considering applicants with a proven track record of failing as CEO

        • By danillonunes 2026-03-0819:51

          Can't risk hiring an amateur and he accidently succeeded.

        • By fuzztester 2026-03-0819:59

          I've heard it's called falling, er, failing upwards.

      • By philipallstar 2026-03-0819:52

        If someone's actually willing to pay that for you, you should take the job. If no one is, then you are not even as good as Pat Gelsinger when he doesn't meet his objectives.

      • By HiPhish 2026-03-0819:54

        I'd do it for free, just for the lulz.

      • By ryandrake 2026-03-0819:41

        I'll do it for $1m/year. Come on, shareholders, you could save a fortune.

    • By mitthrowaway2 2026-03-0819:22

      [flagged]

  • By jcheng 2026-03-0819:022 reply

    Details: $2MM/year in salary, the rest in performance based incentives. The $692MM figure is based on hitting all of the maximums (200% of a few different targets) and is the total for three years.

    • By Someone1234 2026-03-0819:176 reply

      [flagged]

      • By Matticus_Rex 2026-03-0819:222 reply

        No, not at all. You're taxed on equity at fair market value when it vests. It's only after that when you get taxed at a lower rate on the capital gains.

      • By onlyrealcuzzo 2026-03-0819:222 reply

        No, these are RSUs, which - to your shock - are taxed as ordinary income upon payout (if that even occurs).

        He did not get some custom stock now that will appreciate in value magically, if and only if he meets targets - or certain types of options can also act like this.

        Even if GOOG stock grew so much, that this ended up being a $3B pay package, he'd be taxed as ordinary income on the full amount at payout - not even the reduced capital gains on the extra ~$2.7B in growth between agreement and payout.

        • By compiler-guy 2026-03-0819:30

          These aren’t options, but you are otherwise correct.

        • By ajb 2026-03-0819:422 reply

          Shocking? Taxed on payout is a discount versus ordinary stiffs who get taxed every year. A percentage taken from the increase of an amount every year, is more than the same percentage taken at the end; as the former foregoes the opportunity to earn a return on the amount taxed earlier. This is quite significant over longer periods. (I learned that from one of Warren Buffet's annual letters - I think he was explaining why insurance is a great business to be in, because the same effect applies to long-horizon insurance policies).

          • By plorkyeran 2026-03-0819:511 reply

            Getting a lump-sum payment at the end of three years is worse than getting paid incrementally, and is sort of the opposite of how insurance companies make money (which is taking frontloaded payments for long-term liabilities and investing the float).

          • By jcheng 2026-03-0820:031 reply

            > A percentage taken from the increase of an amount every year, is more than the same percentage taken at the end

            It sounds like you're describing a hypothetical tax on unrealized gains? Do you have a link to the Buffet letter?

      • By ChadNauseam 2026-03-0819:19

        I don't think this would be considered capital gains if it's being paid to him. You typically pay income taxes on your income, if it's in the form of money given to you by your employer.

      • By andsoitis 2026-03-0819:201 reply

        > then up to $230M/year is "lower tax rate than his secretary" income?

        Why do you think that?

        • By Someone1234 2026-03-0819:541 reply

          The IRS thinks that too. Stock grants, assuming they're EVER taxed (which isn't a given), are taxed at a lower rate than income. But as I indicated, most are never vested in the traditional sense, and are even lower than standard capital gains.

      • By lingrush4 2026-03-0819:19

        [dead]

  • By crop_rotation 2026-03-0818:498 reply

    Pichai has been a very poor CEO but Google's position was so strong that it is still doing fine. I am sure he is in the founder's good graces so as long as the company's stock takes a big dive he is gonna stay at the helm and keep raking in the big bucks.

    • By lateforwork 2026-03-0819:125 reply

      Poor CEO my abs. When ChatGPT came out Microsoft was singing victory songs, and predicted Google's imminent death. 3 years later Google has one of the best models and Microsoft is still borrowing OpenAI's model. Not only that, Google is running their models on their own hardware, not Nvidia's.

      • By avidiax 2026-03-0819:422 reply

        One of the things that a CEO drives is vision and innovation.

        Sundar misses the mark on these things. AI is a good example. Google invented the transformer architecture, but simply published it for its competitors to use. It took a code red in 2023 to finally push Google to develop products based on this.

        Cloud. Years late to the game. All it would have taken is a letter similar to the famous Bezos memo to eventually get all of Google's world-class scaled infra pointing externally and generating revenue. Instead, Google Cloud started late, and couldn't reuse much of the internal infrastructure.

        Stadia, another example. That architecture is probably the future. It's not clear how gamers in developing countries are going to afford thousands of dollars in hardware that sits idle 90% of the time.

        • By lateforwork 2026-03-0820:001 reply

          > Google invented the transformer architecture, but simply published it for its competitors to use.

          That's how innovation works in this industry. If companies didn't allow researchers to publish their work it would set us back decades. Researchers building on each other's work is how this industry was built.

          > It took a code red in 2023 to finally push Google to develop products based on this.

          So Google executed. Ability to execute is one of the things that makes a good CEO. Other CEOs have additional qualities such as vision, and getting others to believe in the vision. But not every CEO needs to be a Steve Jobs!

          Plenty of innovations are coming out of Google, just look at Nano Banana Pro for example.

        • By jstummbillig 2026-03-0819:59

          Google is up 800% under Sundar. I guess the blanket explanation of irrational markets can fill a cognitive dissonance shaped hole of any size hole.

      • By plorkyeran 2026-03-0819:56

        Google invented the basis of LLMs, but under Pai failed to come up with the idea of ChatGPT. Getting Gemini into a workable state required the return of Page and Brin. It seems to be working out for Google, but how they got here is a very big mark against Pichai's leadership.

      • By KellyCriterion 2026-03-0819:171 reply

        my bet is:

        - Google will be #1 because of sher data amount

        - Anthropic will be #2 because of the best product (whatever this may mean in the future)

        - Microsoft will be #3, because of enough cash to follow

      • By astral_drama 2026-03-0819:381 reply

        I'm pretty sure even chatgpt could have told the senior leaders at Google to invest heavily in AI. Not a difficult call to make.

        • By usrusr 2026-03-0819:441 reply

          What if the CEO isn't just telling the company how much to invest, but also has influence on how that money is used? Google's relative success, if it exists, I'd rather not judge, isn't from investing more than everybody else. Because the money just keeps pouring into these things, for all contenders.

      • By weare138 2026-03-0819:40

        So Sundar is an AI engineer in his spare time too?

    • By pinkmuffinere 2026-03-0818:564 reply

      > Pichai has been a very poor CEO

      Why do you say this? I’m not familiar with him, and really haven’t paid much attention to Google’s strategy beyond cultural awareness, but I think Google has done well with staying competitive in AI, is dominating the self driving battle with Waymo, and has mostly kept its good brand intact (no small feat when you are so big). Are there some big mis-steps I don’t know about?

      • By tombert 2026-03-0819:311 reply

        Not the person you're replying to, but something that has bothered me about him (and a lot of SV tech), is how they did rapid over-hiring in 2022, then a year later fire a bunch of people, while he claimed he took "full responsibility", but still got a nice happy bonus that year. I'm not sure I know what "taking full responsibility" actually means, because to me it seems like if you have to lay off thousands of people in a year, that would be a good reason to not get a bonus.

        These are peoples' lives. People almost certainly quit decent jobs because there was a prestige factor in working for Google, potentially moved to the overpriced world of California, just to be fired less than a year later because apparently Pichai thought that interest rates would never increase and there would be free money for forever. These people have families, and they almost certainly thought that moving to Google would be a "stable" position, because it's one of the biggest SV companies.

        I don't know if he's good for the stock price, that's tougher to gauge, but I do think he's a short-sighted jerk.

        • By rkomorn 2026-03-0819:341 reply

          The "I take full responsibility" thing has been entirely meaningless.

          I guess it's supposed to convey that it's not the laid-off folks' fault, and that it was "his decision", but as you said: "taking full responsibility" without any real impact to his life? I may as well take full responsibility for the layoffs. It'd mean just as much.

      • By turzmo 2026-03-0819:051 reply

        I would argue that Google has had declining quality in search results, bordering on completely unusable in the past few years, and that has resulted in people using LLMs for things that they would have searched for years ago. Although they are competitive in AI, I think it is surprising that their product continues to frustrate people and that they are a distant second place.

        • By pinkmuffinere 2026-03-0819:112 reply

          Without taking a stance on whether their search has improved or degraded, we can observe that the same claim (“search is so degraded it’s unusable”) has been common for like 5 years at this point. If it’s really such a problem, why haven’t people already switched? Google’s search is at 90% market share [1]. Surely if it was perceived as a problem to customers there should be some measurable effect?

          [1] https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share

      • By rybosworld 2026-03-0819:001 reply

        Sundar was at the helm when the decision to worsen search results for the sake of ad revenue was made.

        Previously, the two concerns were "firewalled" so as to prevent the money-generating side of the company from eroding the user experience.

        This is a theme that's been at the core of every Titan of Industry's decline. That is: chasing of short-term results with disregard for the long term consequences. Alphabet is just so big and dominate in search that it will likely take quite a long time for the negative effects to appear. And they have other large businesses that haven't been as aggressively enshitified (Youtube, GCP).

        See Intel, Boeing, GE etc.

        • By gtowey 2026-03-0819:43

          It's like when the Titanic struck the iceberg and the crew mostly thought the ship would be fine.

          Just because they're still making money doesn't mean the company hasn't already been damaged beyond repair. But in this case by the time it's clear the damage is fatal, those at the helm have jumped ship with piles of cash.

      • By fragmede 2026-03-0819:46

        They missed the boat with ChatGPT, the research paper for it initially came from Google. There's no real focus between Android, ChromeOS, and Fuschia. The AI results box was possible a decade ago, but not giving money to the sites the info was gotten from was too far a stretch. How I feel is that the company doesn't really know what it's doing, there's no real leadership. KilledByGoogle is a website. With Stadia the technology was there but didn't have the right backing to make it in the market. Though it turns out those GPUs are useful for GCP for AI, so that might have been the real reason. He's just not much of a leader. He doesn't need to go full Elon, but some amount of character would be nice.

    • By nashashmi 2026-03-0819:20

      I don't like him either but he is definitely exchanging Google's future positions and cashing it in for profit now, which reflects positively on him.

    • By smt88 2026-03-0819:042 reply

      Pichai is being evaluated for his effect on stock price. His shareholders don't care if every product and service they offer has gotten worse for users in the meantime.

      Gemini keeping pace with Claude and ChatGPT is clearly some kind of management victory, because Zuckerberg and Musk don't seem to be able to do it despite having limitless cash to spend.

      • By CuriouslyC 2026-03-0819:11

        Don't give Pichai credit for that. Google had the strongest ML research org on the planet before he took over, and it had Demis, arguably the best researcher in the field (and it had Geoffrey Hinton before that). The fact that goog was so far behind OAI despite Demis blazing frontiers was a major management failure.

        Sundar's enshittification has also juiced short term share prices at the cost of long term health. It might turn out to be a decent decision for search because it's in the midst of being disrupted, but that's a happy accident for Sundar, not 4d chess (and you can argue the enshittification hastened the disruption).

      • By JCharante 2026-03-0819:421 reply

        naive question: which product and service has gotten worse?

        Like they removed the youtube dislike button

        what else?

        Everything seems to be getting better. Tying incentives to Waymo is almost unfair because Waymo is amazing and just keeps getting better.

        • By smt88 2026-03-0822:49

          Text search (without Gemini) and Gmail are much worse than they used to be. Android is less open, Chrome doesn't allow proper ad-blocking, YouTube has insane ads if you don't have Premium.

    • By dwa3592 2026-03-0819:012 reply

      >> Pichai has been a very poor CEO and then immediately follows with "but Google's position was so strong".

      Isn't it a CEO's job to make sure the company's position is strong among other responsibilities?

      • By MikeNotThePope 2026-03-0819:06

        I believe that the parent comment is saying Google was in a strong position before Pichal took over.

      • By shevy-java 2026-03-0819:15

        I think this refers less so on "Pichai did a great job" and more that Google is in a good position right now. One COULD say that Pichai is responsible for this - but probably many other semi-competent CEOs could have done about an equally solid job here. Google would have profited either way.

    • By shevy-java 2026-03-0819:14

      I kind of agree. Google's trajectory is going upwards. Unfortunately so.

    • By KellyCriterion 2026-03-0819:181 reply

      I remember Pichai mainly for his "AI now first everything" in 2015, destroying Google search as a reliable channel to acquisit users somehow for free.

      • By kingofmen 2026-03-0819:332 reply

        That may have been bad for users, but you can hardly claim it was bad for the company - not even in the long run. Ten years is like 40% of Google's lifetime, that is the long run! And if indeed he went all-in on AI in 2015, that seems to me like a damn near prophetic vision. Dislike AI by all means, but you can't say it's not the Current Big Thing or that Google is doing badly because of it. To see that coming so early as 2015 looks rather skilful to me.

        I did not know this about Pichai and if true, it makes me feel rather better about his leadership.

        • By vitus 2026-03-0819:51

          > if indeed he went all-in on AI in 2015, that seems to me like a damn near prophetic vision.

          Also note that 7 years later, when ChatGPT came out, built on top of Google Brain research (transformers), Google was caught flat-footed.

          Even supposing that Pichai really had the right vision a decade ago, he completely failed in leading its execution until a serious threat to the company's core business model materialized.

        • By KellyCriterion 2026-03-0916:59

          Not sure if the days of SEO spam where that much worse than todays AI spam? :-D

    • By mountainriver 2026-03-0819:111 reply

      Pichai has been a terrible CEO, he almost lost the AI race before it started because he was too focused on Google’s consumer products.

      I was shocked they kept him around. He’s very much just a money manager like Tim Cook or Steve Ballmer.

      Those types are great in the short term but risk the entire company’s future long term

      • By nilkn 2026-03-0819:132 reply

        I'm surprised people still think this. Google has the strongest position of any company in the world on AI. They have expertise and capability across the entire stack from chips to data centers to fundamental research to frontier models. Just because they weren't first-to-market with a chatbot doesn't mean they almost lost or made some terrible durable blunder.

        That's about Google, though. The picture about Sundar specifically is harder to evaluate. The pessimistic take is that Google had that position already and Sundar failed to proactively lead through a fundamental product shift, forcing the company onto the defensive for some time. The optimistic take is that Sundar, having occupied the top spot since 2015, prioritized investments in the company's overall technology development, then successfully executed a rapid product pivot when the market changed, securing a dominant position in both research and product that nobody else can compete with long-term.

        • By loudmax 2026-03-0819:171 reply

          All of Google's advantages in AI are despite Sundar Pichai's leadership, not because of it.

        • By mountainriver 2026-03-0921:41

          People give him way too many breaks, he's a money manager. He was asleep at the wheel when OpenAI absolutely steamrolled them, even though they very easily could have won that race.

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