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Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai officially joined the billionaire’s club after Google’s parent company reported blockbuster earnings.
Pichai, 53 – the company’s longest-serving chief executive as of this month – saw his net worth soar to around $1.1 billion as Alphabet shares near an all-time high, according to a Bloomberg report.
Most leaders in the tech industry – including Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang – owe their massive fortunes to founding equity stakes in their platforms.
Pichai, meanwhile, holds just a 0.02% stake in the company.
But his entry into 10-figure status comes after a blowout few years for Alphabet, which has added more than $1 trillion in market value and returned about 120% to investors since early 2023 from optimism around the company’s AI opportunities.
On Wednesday, Alphabet reported sales and profit in the most recent quarter that beat Wall Street estimates.
The newly-crowned billionaire was born into a middle-class family, growing up in a two-room apartment in southern India without a car or telephone.
When he was awarded a scholarship to Stanford University in 1993, his family purchased him a plane ticket to California that cost more than his father’s annual salary of $1,000.
He snapped up a job at Google in 2004 and worked his way through the ranks, helping to develop the Chrome browser and later running the Android division.
In 2015, Pichai was tapped to lead the company – the same year Google restructured itself to become a subsidiary of Alphabet. He was named CEO of Alphabet, as well, in 2019.
“One of the first things I did as CEO was to pivot the company to be focused on AI,” Pichai told Bloomberg in October.
Google made its first AI investment in 2014 with the $400 million purchase of DeepMind.
Pichai, like most other leaders in the tech industry, has continued to ramp up spending on AI.
The company recorded $50 billion in spending on AI projects last year alone.
On Wednesday, Alphabet hiked its capital expenditures estimate for the full-year by $10 billion, to $85 billion, and reported a 16% jump in research and development spending.
Pichai said during a post-earnings call that the spending was necessary to keep up with a “growth in demand for cloud customers.”
While Pichai’s fortune has soared to new heights, the Google chief could have reaped a lot more in gains if he hadn’t sold so much of his stock over the years, according to Bloomberg.
The CEO has sold more than $650 million worth of Alphabet stock over the past decade, losing out on more than $1 billion in potential gains.
His stake would be worth more than $2.5 billion if he had held on to all of his shares, according to Bloomberg.
Some of Pichai’s wealth goes toward his cricket obsession, paying $182 million this year for a 49% share of London Spirit, a four-year-old franchise that competes in the British cricket league, The Hundred.
The Google boss purchased his massive California mansion in Los Altos Hills for $40 million, complete with a large infinity pool, state-of-the-art gym, tennis court and mini golf course, according to several news outlets.
Pichai is also reportedly a fan of luxury cars, owning a Mercedes Maybach S650, BMW 730 LD and Mercedes V-Class, according to reports.
While it’s unusual for a non-founding executive to breach the billion-dollar mark, it’s not totally unheard of.
Eric Schmidt, 70, who was Google’s CEO from 2001 to 2011, is worth $36.6 billion, according to Bloomberg.
Most of his wealth is held in Alphabet stock.
Google co-founders Larry Page, 52, and Sergey Brin, 51, are in an entirely different league with net worths of $171.2 billion and $160.4 billion, respectively. That places them in the top 10 among the richest people in the world.
