Sundar Pichai is a prominent Indian-American, who is currently the CEO of Alphabet Inc. and Google LLC. He was born on June 10, 1972, in Madras (now Chennai), Tamil Nadu. Pichai is celebrating his 52nd birthday this year.
Pichai steered the trillion-dollar corporation through layoffs, the pandemic and the current AI boom that is sweeping Silicon Valley.
His passion for technology and curiosity were cultivated in large part by his parents, Regunatha Pichai, an electrical engineer employed by the British conglomerate GEC, and Lakshmi, a stenographer.
Pichai was interviewed in the Googleplex on April Fools' Day, 2004, the same day the firm debuted Gmail.
He revealed to Bloomberg that at first, he believed Google's free email service to be an infamous clever joke.
As a vice president of product management, Pichai began his career working on Google's Toolbar.
Another early accomplishment for Pichai was persuading Sergey Brin and Larry Page that Google needed to create its own browser.
By setting Bing as the new Internet Explorer default search engine in 2006, Microsoft set up a ‘doomsday’ situation for Google. Pichai contributed to persuading Google executives to develop Google Chrome, the company's own web browser, in order to lessen the impact of this move.
He took the lead in the Android division in 2013 in part because of his ‘substance over overt style’ philosophy.
He is credited for being the brains of Chrome OS, the operating system that drives Google's low-cost Chromebook computers.
Pichai is also said to have played a key role in organising Google's $3.2 billion takeover of Nest in 2014.
He was regarded as Google cofounder and former CEO Larry Page's right-hand man as he ascended through the ranks.
Pichai's next significant advancement came in late 2014 when Page placed him in control of the company's core products.
Pichai expanded his portfolio to include Google+, Maps, Search, commerce and advertisements, and infrastructure after demonstrating his abilities with Chrome and Android.
In less than a year, he was appointed Google's CEO.
Pichai was added to Alphabet's board of directors in July 2017.
After two years, Pichai received his last promotion when Alphabet's president, Brin, and CEO, Page, announced their resignations and Pichai took over as CEO.
In a 2023 April regulatory filing, Google revealed that Pichai's 2022 earnings were $226 million, primarily from stock awards, placing him among the highest-paid CEOs in the United States.
Pichai held 2.4 million shares as of February 2024, but he sold 180,000 shares through May 2024, according to a filing he made with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
With his Alphabet shares, that values his net worth at around $390 million as of mid-May 2024.
Additionally, Pichai possesses about 600,000 units that are not yet vested.
According to some estimates, his net worth is reputedly above $1.3 billion, and since joining Alphabet in 2004, he is said to have sold about a billion dollars worth of shares.
He got one of the biggest rewards in his tenure at the corporation in 2022, totalling $226 million in salary and stock awards in the form of performance-based or restricted stock units (PSUs) or restricted stock units (GSUs).
