C-suite At Alphabet Make B-A-N-K From 2024 Equity Awards

The C-suite at Google's parent Alphabet collectively scooped up more than $215 million in compensation for 2024, and the CEO was the worst paid among them.

The financial rewards are contained in a proxy statement the mega-ad-cum-cloud corp filed recently [PDF] ahead of its Annual Meeting of Stockholders on June 6.

CEO Sundar Pichai picked up a total of $10.725 million, comprised of a $2.015 million base salary – up marginally on the year prior – stock awards of $405,630, and all other compensation of $8.304 million. This was up 21.8 percent on 2023 but pales compared to $225.9 million he netted in 2022.

It's all about equity awards. They can't come thick and fast every year or employees and shareholders can get a bit twitchy. And with a net worth in the region of $1.1 billion, readers can rest easy that Pichai is doing just fine.

How about his generals? The new CFO, Anat Ashkenazi, was awarded $49.98 million, including a whopping $38.5 million in stock awards, and a $9.9 million bonus. She'd fit right in with the culture at Vulture Towers.

Her predecessor, Ruth Porat, was paid $30.16 million, including $27 million in stock awards.

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Prabhakar Raghavan, senior veep for Knowledge and Information at Google, was awarded $46.99 million, up 12 percent year-on-year. Stock awards were $43.97 million. Chief business officer Philip Schindler's package was worth $47 million, also up 12 percent, and his stock awards amounted to the same $43.97 million.

Poor old Kent Walker, chief legal officer, had to make do with $27.14 million in stock awards, taking his total compensation to $30.16 million, up a relatively meager 10.3 percent.

It's tough at the top, but someone has to do it. As for the rest of Google's workforce, "the 2024 annual total compensation of our median compensated employee was $331,894, and the 2024 annual total compensation of our CEO was $10,725,043. The resulting ratio of Chief Executive Officer to Median Employee total compensation is 32 to 1," Alphabet says in the report.

Alphabet grew its revenue by 14 percent in calendar 2024 [PDF] to $350 billion – the vast majority of this from ad sales – to report a net income of $100 billion. ®