Pichai’s stock boosts come every three years, in 2019 he received a similar package of $281 million.
Alphabet stock, meanwhile, fell by 39% in 2022 amid a broader tech and market slowdown. Shares have rebounded this year, moving up about 19.5% since January.
Other top executives also received healthy paychecks in 2022, though nowhere near as large as Pichai’s. Prabhakar Raghavan, senior vice president of knowledge and information at Google and Philipp Schindler, Google’s chief business officer, each made $37 million. Google and Alphabet CFO Ruth Porat and Kent Walker, chief legal officer, both made about $24.5 million.
In January, Alphabet announced it would cut 12,000 jobs amounting to a 6% cut in its total workforce. The median compensation for an Alphabet employee is just under $280,000, according to the filing. It means Pichai’s salary is more than 800 times larger.
Someone making the $15.50 minimum wage in Alphabet’s home state of California would have to work 14.6 million hours, or just over 7000 years (with 40 hour work weeks and no time off) to catch up with Pichai’s 2022 salary.
Ballooning CEO compensation has been a controversial topic in recent years.
Pay for top executives has skyrocketed by 1460% since 1978 according to a study by the Economic Policy Institute, and more than 80% of their pay is typically stock-related.
“This escalation of CEO compensation and of executive compensation more generally has fueled the growth of top 1% and top 0.1% incomes, leaving fewer of the gains of economic growth for ordinary workers and widening the gap between very high earners and the bottom 90%,” wrote analysts at the institute. “The economy would suffer no harm if CEOs were paid less (or were taxed more).”