Sundar Pichai’s Near-Billionaire Status; Oracle in Spotlight

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai is close to achieving billionaire status, thanks to his generous stock compensation—and he’s only likely to get richer. Alphabet revealed in a securities filing late Friday that it had awarded him several new grants of stock, to vest over the next three years, which could potentially be worth nearly $700 million. We say “potentially” because he’ll only get that much stock if Alphabet shares outperform most of the stock market in the next few years. Still, judging by how Pichai has done in the past with these stock awards, that’s a good bet.

The CEO gets big stock awards every three years, some of which vest over time regardless of what happens, while others are “performance-based,” which means Pichai only collects if Alphabet stock does well. Take an award he got in 2019 that included two such performance-based tranches with a “target value” totaling $90 million. If the stock did very well compared to the rest of the market, he could get twice the target. Pichai ended up receiving almost the maximum amount possible, worth more than $300 million when it vested between 2022 and 2023, although about half went to pay taxes.