Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google has been granted an equity stock grant award worth $ 199 million by Alphabet Inc, the parent concern of Google. This achievement has made Sundar one of the most highly paid executives in the globe.
In the securities filing Friday, Alphabet Inc revealed that they have given 273,328 Class C shares on Feb. 3 that will vest in quarterly increments through 2019 if Sundar Pichai continues to be in the company.
This award is touted to be the largest equity stake offering given to a Chief Executive in its history.
Apple Inc has previously awarded $376 million worth stakes in 2011 when he was named Chief Executive as a successor to Steve Jobs.
With the new shares in his kitty, the value of Pichai’s Alphabet Holdings is now approximately $650m.
Pichai was the former deputy of Larry Page, the legendary Google co-founder.
This grant will lift Sundar Pichai's stakes in Google to $ 600 million, but it is still well below the stakes held by co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt, Alphabet’s executive chairman.
Alphabet Inc also awarded its CFO Ruth Porat a stock award worth $ 38.3 million. Diane Green, head of Google's cloud business operations was given shares worth $ 42.8 million.
Company's financial statements in the last quarter were pretty much incredible, and this has compelled its parent concern to dump buckets of cash on their most trusted operations heads.
In usual cases, Google used to offer grant equity awards to its executives once in every two years. Google believes that this strategy of giving away stocks will encourage managers to take a long-term view of the business.
Sundar Pichai was the think tank behind Google's Chrome Web Browser business, and later he ran the Android mobile operating system for several years.
He is now considered as the most valuable recruiting target for its rivals.
Pichai was born in Madurai, Tamil Nadu in India and is married to Anjali a chemical engineer and batchmate of Sunder at IIT Kharagpur. The couple has two children.
