SAN FRANCISCO — Alphabet, Google’s parent company, has approved a record-breaking pay package for its chief executive, Sundar Pichai, that could be worth as much as $692 million over three years — roughly 1 trillion Korean won — and, for the first time, explicitly ties his potential payout to the performance of two of the company’s most closely watched moonshot businesses.
In a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission released Friday, Alphabet said its board’s Leadership Development and Compensation Committee signed off on the new plan on March 4, citing Pichai’s “strong performance.” The award, combining salary and equity, is more than double the size of his last three‑year grant in 2022, which was valued at up to $336 million, and is the largest since he became Google’s chief executive in 2015. Alphabet typically refreshes CEO equity awards on a three‑year cycle.
Under the package, Pichai’s base salary will remain at $2 million a year, unchanged since 2020, and he will not receive a separate annual cash bonus. Instead, he is slated to receive $84 million in Alphabet stock over three years, contingent simply on his continued employment.
The bulk of the upside, however, is performance-based. Pichai can earn as much as $252 million in Alphabet stock depending on the company’s total shareholder return, or TSR — a common Wall Street metric that captures stock price gains and dividends — relative to peers over the performance period.
In a notable departure from past awards, the plan also includes equity linked directly to two of Alphabet’s high-profile subsidiaries: Waymo, its autonomous ride-hailing unit, and Wing, its drone delivery business. Pichai could receive up to $260 million in Waymo stock and $90 million in Wing stock, with payouts tied to the increase in per‑share value of each business.
The move effectively places market-style performance targets on units that have long been treated as long-horizon “Other Bets” inside Alphabet’s conglomerate structure, and it is likely to intensify speculation that the company is preparing the ground for eventual public listings or partial spin‑offs of Waymo and Wing. Assigning explicit equity-based compensation at the subsidiary level is often seen as a precursor to more formal market valuation, whether through an initial public offering or structured minority stake sale.
The new package cements Pichai’s status as one of the highest-paid executives in the technology industry. For comparison, Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella received total compensation of about $96.5 million in 2025, while Apple’s Tim Cook earned $74.3 million, according to their companies’ most recent disclosures — figures that are sizable but still far below the potential value of Pichai’s latest award.
The timing of the grant underscores Alphabet’s continued reliance on Pichai as it navigates intensifying competition in artificial intelligence, regulatory scrutiny in the United States and Europe, and investor pressure to extract more value from its portfolio of experimental businesses. By more tightly coupling his upside to shareholder returns and the performance of specific subsidiaries, the board appears to be betting that sharper incentives will translate into more disciplined execution and clearer monetization paths for Alphabet’s next generation of growth engines.
On the same day the compensation plan was approved, March 4, Pichai sold 32,500 Class C shares of Alphabet at an average price of $303, generating proceeds of roughly $9.8 million, or about 14.6 billion won. The sale was disclosed in the same SEC filing and is in line with the kind of periodic stock sales common among senior executives with large, concentrated equity holdings.
Even if Pichai ultimately realizes only a portion of the headline $692 million figure — much of which is at risk if performance targets are not met — the sheer scale of the award is likely to draw scrutiny from corporate governance advocates and some shareholders. Yet it also signals that Alphabet’s board is prepared to pay aggressively to keep its chief executive in place as it tries to convert long-running bets like autonomous driving and drone logistics from costly experiments into sustainable, stand-alone businesses with market-tested valuations.
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