Pichai Sundararajan was born on12 July 1972 in Madura, Tamil Nadu India, into a Tamil family. As Sundar Pichai, he is regarded as an internet genius, now very well known as the CEO of Google, within the Alphabet conglomerate, and which is now the most valuable public company in the USA.
So just how rich is Sundar Pichai? Authoritative sources estimate that Sundar’s net worth is notionally over $650 million as of early 2016, as this includes an award of restricted Alphabet stock worth $199 million in February 2016, vested in quarterly increments up until 2019, which also makes him the highest-paid CEO of any public company in the USA, and one of the richer ones.
Sundar Pichai Net Worth $650 Million
Sundar spent his childhood in Chennai, India where his father, Regunatha was the manager of a General Electric factory. Sundar was educated at Jawahar Vidyalaya and Vana Vani in Chennai, and subsequently graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur with a Bsc in metallurgical engineering. He then proceeded to earn an MSc in material sciences and engineering from Stanford University on a scholarship, and an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania in 2002, both in the USA, including winning scholastic awards at both.
Sundar had begun to earn his net worth in 1998 when he joined Applied Materials, but after his MBA he was hired McKinnsey and Co in New York as a management consultant. Pichai then joined Google in 2004, initially leading research and development in a range of software products, which included Google Chrome, Google OS(2009) and subsequently for Google Drive. He had been appointed vice-president of producr development in 2008, and so then proceeded with overseeing the development of further applications such as Google Maps and Gmail among various other apps, In 2010, the open-sourcing of Google’s video codec VP8 was announced, as was WebM, a new video format. All these products will be very familiar to computer users, and their success contributed significantly to Sundar’s net worth, but of course there was more to come.
Now as vice-president of ChromeSundar was also the driving force behind Chromebook, which was eventually marketed in 2012, and in 2013 of Android. So if you thought Larry Page and Sergey Brin were all that comprised Google, you now know about Sundar Pichai. In fact he was so successful that apparently both Microsoft and Twitter attempted to ‘head-hunt’ him, but at Google he was already director of Jive Software, from 2011, and there was more to come for him at the company, plus more in the way of financial rewards, benefiting his net worth considerably.
Pichai was made product chief in October 2014, but this proved a rather temporary assignment as Larry Page appointed him CEO of Google a year later under the Alphabet Inc, conglomerate re-arrangement. Clearly Sundar is one of the most valuable employees of Google/Alphabet, and equally clearly the company wants to keep him, hence the recent share award, which comes to fruition in 2019. He has clearly been a big influence on growth of the company to its current status, overtaking Apple in value at $554 billion compared to $534 billion, and with significant increases in revenue. (Concurrently CFO Ruth Porat received $38.3 million, and cloud operation director Diane Greene $42.8 million. These awards are not only a vote of confidence, but also indicate a desire to retain the services of these personnel for years.)
In his personal life Sundar Pichai is married to teenage sweetheart Anjali, and they have a son and a daughter.
