Google CEO Sundar Pichai, 53, who has been at the helm of the tech giant for nearly a decade, is now officially a billionaire. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Pichai is now worth $1.1 billion, a rare achievement for a non-founding CEO.
Pichai’s rise in net worth is due to the growth of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, which has added more than $1 trillion in market value and returned 120% to investors since the beginning of 2023, per Bloomberg.
Bloomberg notes that Pichai’s billionaire status is a rare occurrence in an industry where CEOs like Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg owe their billionaire status to founding equity stakes in their tech companies.
Pichai wasn’t a founding member of Google when it began in 1998. He instead joined the company as a new hire in 2004 after graduating from Stanford University with a Master’s degree in Materials Science and Engineering in 1995, earning an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business in 2002, and briefly working for consulting firm McKinsey. His first position at Google was as the head of product management and development.
Pichai spent over a decade rising through the ranks at Google, overseeing the growth of products like Google Chrome. He became Google’s CEO in August 2015 and the CEO of Alphabet in December 2019.
Pichai has a 0.02% stake in Alphabet that is worth about $440 million, with the rest of his fortune in cash, per Bloomberg. Over the past decade, he has sold more than $650 million worth of Alphabet stock.
Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Alphabet’s earnings report on Wednesday underscored the company’s growth. The earnings, for the second quarter ending June 30, beat expectations, with the company’s net income rising to $28.2 billion, a nearly 20% increase from the same time last year.
The report also showed that Alphabet generated $96.43 billion in revenue for the second quarter of the year, a 14% year-over-year growth. Revenue was higher than the $94 billion analysts expected.
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“We had a standout quarter, with robust growth across the company,” Pichai stated in the earnings report. He added that Alphabet was increasing its AI spending from $75 billion to $85 billion due to “strong and growing demand” for its Cloud products.
Alphabet stock was up nearly 2% this year. The company is the fifth-largest in the world, with a market value of $2.34 trillion.
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