Alphabet, Google CEO Pichai is awarded $226 million in compensation for 2022

Sundar Pichai, the CEO of both Alphabet and Google, received $226 million in compensation for 2022 including $218 million in stock awards according to The Wall Street Journal.  His annual salary for last year was $2 million. As for the stock awards, in December the company reported a new triannual stock grant to Pichai valued at $210 million based on both performance and time. For 2021, the executive's triannual stock award wasn't part of his compensation and he received $6.3 million in total pay for that year.

The 2022 stock award includes two tiers of performance stock units with a target value of $63 million each. Another $84 million in Alphabet restrictive stock units is part of the grant. The filing in December said that 60% of Pichai's stock award would be made up of the company's performance stock units which is a higher percentage than seen in  previous years. Pichai's previous triannual stock award was received by him in 2019 when only 43% of the award was made up of Alphabet's performance stock units. That year, the executive's total compensation was $281 million.

But this past January Pichai said that in an effort to cut costs, Alphabet executives would receive lower bonuses. Google recently announced plans to lay off a company record 12,000 jobs worldwide, 6% of the company's global headcount. Despite the lay offs, the company's finance chief recently warned employees that additional spending cuts are coming.

Other Alphabet executives receive annual stock grants instead of every third year like Pichai, but their total compensation is much lower (although not shoddy by any means). Both Prabhakar Raghavan, Google's senior vice president of knowledge and information, and Philipp Schindler, chief business officer, received $37 million in compensation for 2022. Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat received $24.5 million in compensation for last year.

For 2022, Alphabet reported revenue of $282.8 billion, 10% higher than the previous year. Net income declined from $76 billion in 2021 to $60 billion in 2022 as diluted EPS dropped from $5.61 to $4.56. That works out to a decline of 18.7% year-over-year. During 2022 Alphabet's shares declined 39% although it has bounced back 19% so far this year bringing the company's valuation to $1.36 trillion.

Pichai is facing tough times at Google thanks to the rise of conversational AI chatbots like ChatGPT. Already, there are rumors that thanks to Bing's connection with the latter, Samsung might replace Google Search with Bing as the default search engine on all of its Galaxy devices. Google does have its own AI chatbot called Bard.

Pichai's compensation of $226 million is more than 800 times the median Alphabet employee's pay. In August 2015 he became CEO of Google and added the Alphabet CEO title to his business card in October of that same year after Google restructured the company.