A grant received by Google CEO Sundar Pichai before his promotion as Senior Vice President, Products back in 2014 in the form of 353,939 restricted shares is now valued at $380 million. He will receive the amount on April 25, making it one of the largest payouts made to a company executive recently, according to a Bloomberg report.
This Madhurai resident saw the value of his grant swell after Google’s parent company Alphabet’s stock surged 90% since the day he received the grant. Bloomberg reports that Pichai received two more grants since then, but the cumulative amount and Pichai’s compensation for 2017 is yet to be made known. He has been receiving $100 million as compensation amount since 2014.
Pichai began working for Google in 2004. He then worked on managing the innovation and product work of Chrome and Chrome OS, client software products of the firm.
A restricted share is the award of shares of the company to an executive subject to certain conditions such as continued service or achieving certain milestones. Until the conditions are met, the executive will not have the right to cash in on the shares. Shares can be encashed by either selling them or transferring them.
Standard and Poor (S&P), an independent provider of credit ratings has 500 companies listed among the firms for finance-based research and analysis, and Google is one among these. CEOs from these firms have vested or exercised stock options for shares worth an average of $16.2 million.
There are other senior officers from technology-based firms who have benefited from such payouts. In 2012, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg made $2.28 billion by exercising his 60 million stock option during the social media giant’s IPO back in 2012. His deputy, Sheryl Sandberg too, vested restricted shares worth $822 million a few months later.
Likewise, Elon Musk, CEO and Co-Founder of Tesla made $1.34 billion from 6.71 million stock option in 2016. During this time, two top officials from Monster Beverage received $598 million. This was thanks to a rise in stocks at an average of 30% annually in 10 years.