alt.hn

3/8/2026 at 6:37:37 PM

Google just gave Sundar Pichai a $692M pay package

 https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/07/google-just-gave-sundar-pichai-a-692m-pay-package/

by Arcuru

3/8/2026 at 7:21:47 PM

At least the article mentions that it is contingent on bonus targets. All too often articles skip that and say "Y was paid $$$".

Notably, go look at Intel's Pat Gelsinger. Prior to his firing, lots of articles talking about how he was one of the highest paid CEOs (citing numbers in excess of $150M). They'd fail to mention that it was over several years and only if he met targets.

Well, he didn't meet those targets. His actual compensation was about $10M/year.

by BeetleB

3/8/2026 at 7:23:33 PM

I'm willing to fail as Intel's CEO for the low, low cost of $5m/year, and I can get it done in a year.

by bombcar

3/8/2026 at 7:30:17 PM

Sorry, we’re only considering applicants with a proven track record of failing as CEO

by computomatic

3/8/2026 at 7:51:49 PM

Can't risk hiring an amateur and he accidently succeeded.

by danillonunes

3/8/2026 at 7:59:30 PM

I've heard it's called falling, er, failing upwards.

by fuzztester

3/8/2026 at 7:52:33 PM

If someone's actually willing to pay that for you, you should take the job. If no one is, then you are not even as good as Pat Gelsinger when he doesn't meet his objectives.

by philipallstar

3/8/2026 at 7:54:51 PM

I'd do it for free, just for the lulz.

by HiPhish

3/8/2026 at 7:41:11 PM

I'll do it for $1m/year. Come on, shareholders, you could save a fortune.

by ryandrake

3/8/2026 at 7:22:59 PM

[flagged]

by mitthrowaway2

3/8/2026 at 7:02:35 PM

Details: $2MM/year in salary, the rest in performance based incentives. The $692MM figure is based on hitting all of the maximums (200% of a few different targets) and is the total for three years.

by jcheng

3/8/2026 at 7:17:37 PM

[flagged]

by Someone1234

3/8/2026 at 7:22:03 PM

No, not at all. You're taxed on equity at fair market value when it vests. It's only after that when you get taxed at a lower rate on the capital gains.

by Matticus_Rex

3/8/2026 at 7:56:20 PM

This seems to say the opposite. If your employer grants you a statutory stock option, you generally don't include any amount in your gross income when you receive or exercise the option

https://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc427

by rawgabbit

3/8/2026 at 8:36:41 PM

Sundar's stock is not in the form of options, so this explanation is irrelevant.

by compiler-guy

3/8/2026 at 10:15:20 PM

The IRS page refers to Incentive Stock Options (ISOs) as "statutory" options. These are the "holy grail" because they allow you to avoid income tax at exercise and only pay capital gains when you sell.

ISOs have a 100k cap per year.

Further, the next line after your exceprt is "However, you may be subject to alternative minimum tax in the year you exercise an ISO", which is an income tax

by s1artibartfast

3/8/2026 at 7:52:05 PM

[flagged]

by Someone1234

3/8/2026 at 7:58:23 PM

You're thinking of realized capital gains, not tax on the exercise/grant. I don't think there is a way to dodge the latter, and you can't take out a loan or pass down options you never exercised or stocks you were never granted.

by jcheng

3/8/2026 at 8:42:45 PM

You should probably read the filing. First, these aren’t options, it is straight up stock and it does vest.

Second, even if they were options, they definitely vest, otherwise Pichai would never gain control to be able to use them as collateral for a loan.

What you might be thinking is that they never get exercised, which is when the person uses the option to actually buy the share. But even that isn’t as straightforward as you seem to be making it out to be. The money to actually pay the interest on those loans and that is usually done by selling stock acquired this way. And then that income is almost certainly subject to AMT as well as other special taxes in California.

by compiler-guy

3/8/2026 at 7:58:00 PM

Those share options need excising, which probably incurs income tax on the allocation Vs strike price. Then the shares are only worth something to inheritors if that company is doing useful work for its customers over an extremely long period of time. That is likely far more valuable than the tax going towards paying off the interest for a year on some vote-buying spending that happened 20 years prior.

by philipallstar

3/8/2026 at 7:57:27 PM

What do you think happens with loans?

by option

3/8/2026 at 8:05:58 PM

That they pay interest at a lower relative rate than the cost of the taxes that would be due, what do you think happens with the loans?

by Someone1234

3/8/2026 at 7:22:21 PM

No, these are RSUs, which - to your shock - are taxed as ordinary income upon payout (if that even occurs).

He did not get some custom stock now that will appreciate in value magically, if and only if he meets targets - or certain types of options can also act like this.

Even if GOOG stock grew so much, that this ended up being a $3B pay package, he'd be taxed as ordinary income on the full amount at payout - not even the reduced capital gains on the extra ~$2.7B in growth between agreement and payout.

by onlyrealcuzzo

3/8/2026 at 7:30:13 PM

These aren’t options, but you are otherwise correct.

by compiler-guy

3/8/2026 at 7:42:38 PM

Shocking? Taxed on payout is a discount versus ordinary stiffs who get taxed every year. A percentage taken from the increase of an amount every year, is more than the same percentage taken at the end; as the former foregoes the opportunity to earn a return on the amount taxed earlier. This is quite significant over longer periods. (I learned that from one of Warren Buffet's annual letters - I think he was explaining why insurance is a great business to be in, because the same effect applies to long-horizon insurance policies).

by ajb

3/8/2026 at 7:51:40 PM

Getting a lump-sum payment at the end of three years is worse than getting paid incrementally, and is sort of the opposite of how insurance companies make money (which is taking frontloaded payments for long-term liabilities and investing the float).

by plorkyeran

3/8/2026 at 8:35:14 PM

You're thinking about cash. This is options

by ajb

3/9/2026 at 3:41:03 AM

He is not getting options. ISOs have some interesting tax properties that are completely irrelevant to this.

by plorkyeran

3/8/2026 at 8:03:25 PM

> A percentage taken from the increase of an amount every year, is more than the same percentage taken at the end

It sounds like you're describing a hypothetical tax on unrealized gains? Do you have a link to the Buffet letter?

by jcheng

3/8/2026 at 8:40:30 PM

No; just the difference between someone who gets a fixed number of shares and has to sell them (and pay the tax on them) that year, versus someone who is allowed to accumulate the shares and pay the tax at the end.

This may assume that there is more alpha in the shares than other investments you have access to, which is perhaps less true today. But it should probably be your position if you're CEO of the company...

All the Buffett letters are online, but I don't remember what year it was. If I get time I may find it and report back.

by ajb

3/8/2026 at 10:23:37 PM

Why do you think they get to accumulate shares and pay tax at the end. If options Sundar will have the pay income when exercised, or if RSU, they will have to pay income taxes when granted.

If you want to research the tax imlications, the relevant term is PSU (Performance Stock Units), which is the form almost all of these CEO incentives take.

by s1artibartfast

3/8/2026 at 10:53:34 PM

(edited) My bad, I meant to type "options" not "shares". You get to choose when to exercise options. When tax is incurred will vary according to your jurisdiction.

I'm fairly sure that Sundar Pinchai will have paid someone to research the tax implications before negotiating this deal.

by ajb

3/8/2026 at 7:19:54 PM

I don't think this would be considered capital gains if it's being paid to him. You typically pay income taxes on your income, if it's in the form of money given to you by your employer.

by ChadNauseam

3/8/2026 at 7:20:49 PM

> then up to $230M/year is "lower tax rate than his secretary" income?

Why do you think that?

by andsoitis

3/8/2026 at 7:54:38 PM

The IRS thinks that too. Stock grants, assuming they're EVER taxed (which isn't a given), are taxed at a lower rate than income. But as I indicated, most are never vested in the traditional sense, and are even lower than standard capital gains.

by Someone1234

3/8/2026 at 8:18:55 PM

Stock grants (RSUs, like Google gives out) are taxed as ordinary income at the moment they vest.

If you sell them immediately, then you don't pay any additional capital gains tax, because there were no capital gains from the moment you got them to the moment you sold them.

If you hold on to them, you will eventually pay capital gains on any increase in value from the moment they vested until the moment you sell them.

Perhaps, once they are vested, you could take loans against them, to get some cash while avoiding selling them.

But no matter what, they are taxed at the moment you receive them, and again at the moment they leave your possession.

by ahmedtd

3/8/2026 at 7:19:18 PM

[dead]

by lingrush4

3/8/2026 at 6:47:15 PM

Isn't Google a trillion dollar company going gangbusters toward its next trillion dollars?

by petcat

3/8/2026 at 7:15:55 PM

Well currently they make about 1500 bucks a year of every american household just selling ads. Make much less on the rest of the world. So it really just boils down to what the upper limit on ad sales to the american consumer is.

by gotwaz

3/8/2026 at 7:30:57 PM

The cloud business is also doing quite well. Waymo is generating revenue now as well. So not just ads.

by compiler-guy

3/8/2026 at 7:39:22 PM

So how much is the American household spending on Waymo, in average? It's totally insignificant.

by usrusr

3/9/2026 at 11:35:15 AM

The value of Waymo isn't current revenue, it's whether it works reliably and whether it can be scaled.

by ethbr1

3/8/2026 at 7:37:31 PM

Is it profitable?

by raw_anon_1111

3/8/2026 at 7:42:02 PM

Cloud is profitable. Waymo not, but is building. In any event, the grandparent was talking about revenue.

by compiler-guy

3/8/2026 at 8:05:28 PM

Which is completely meaningless. Anyone can sell a bunch of one dollar bills for 50 cents

by raw_anon_1111

3/8/2026 at 8:33:37 PM

That was the proper takeaway during Amazon.com’s preprofit stages.

by compiler-guy

3/9/2026 at 4:52:41 AM

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

by raw_anon_1111

3/9/2026 at 6:00:56 PM

A more sophisticated analysis would involve checking available capital vs run rate and whether or not there is a viable business underneath.

by compiler-guy

3/9/2026 at 9:14:02 PM

An even less sophisticated analysis would know that it doesn’t matter if their marginal cost > marginal revenue…

What next? Are you going to say look at where Apple was pre Jobs as evidence? So all they have to do is resurrect Jobs from the dead and let him take over Waymo?

There is a reason that “look at Amazon!” is meaningless

by raw_anon_1111

3/8/2026 at 6:49:13 PM

Pichai has been a very poor CEO but Google's position was so strong that it is still doing fine. I am sure he is in the founder's good graces so as long as the company's stock takes a big dive he is gonna stay at the helm and keep raking in the big bucks.

by crop_rotation

3/8/2026 at 7:12:24 PM

Poor CEO my abs. When ChatGPT came out Microsoft was singing victory songs, and predicted Google's imminent death. 3 years later Google has one of the best models and Microsoft is still borrowing OpenAI's model. Not only that, Google is running their models on their own hardware, not Nvidia's.

by lateforwork

3/8/2026 at 7:56:15 PM

Google invented the basis of LLMs, but under Pai failed to come up with the idea of ChatGPT. Getting Gemini into a workable state required the return of Page and Brin. It seems to be working out for Google, but how they got here is a very big mark against Pichai's leadership.

by plorkyeran

3/8/2026 at 7:42:22 PM

One of the things that a CEO drives is vision and innovation.

Sundar misses the mark on these things. AI is a good example. Google invented the transformer architecture, but simply published it for its competitors to use. It took a code red in 2023 to finally push Google to develop products based on this.

Cloud. Years late to the game. All it would have taken is a letter similar to the famous Bezos memo to eventually get all of Google's world-class scaled infra pointing externally and generating revenue. Instead, Google Cloud started late, and couldn't reuse much of the internal infrastructure.

Stadia, another example. That architecture is probably the future. It's not clear how gamers in developing countries are going to afford thousands of dollars in hardware that sits idle 90% of the time.

by avidiax

3/8/2026 at 8:00:12 PM

> Google invented the transformer architecture, but simply published it for its competitors to use.

That's how innovation works in this industry. If companies didn't allow researchers to publish their work it would set us back decades. Researchers building on each other's work is how this industry was built.

> It took a code red in 2023 to finally push Google to develop products based on this.

So Google executed. Ability to execute is one of the things that makes a good CEO. Other CEOs have additional qualities such as vision, and getting others to believe in the vision. But not every CEO needs to be a Steve Jobs!

Plenty of innovations are coming out of Google, just look at Nano Banana Pro for example.

by lateforwork

3/9/2026 at 12:00:57 AM

"Ability to execute"

Lmao I love this. "Hey, engineers. Make something like that but better here's money, but only a fraction of what I'll make off it!"

Yeah, being a CEO is reeeally hard. Even when they fail they still walk out with >10m.

by fennecbutt

3/8/2026 at 7:59:20 PM

Google is up 800% under Sundar. I guess the blanket explanation of irrational markets can fill a cognitive dissonance shaped hole of any size hole.

by jstummbillig

3/8/2026 at 7:17:10 PM

my bet is:

- Google will be #1 because of sher data amount

- Anthropic will be #2 because of the best product (whatever this may mean in the future)

- Microsoft will be #3, because of enough cash to follow

by KellyCriterion

3/8/2026 at 7:20:30 PM

What data does Google have that OpenAI can't get at?

by lateforwork

3/8/2026 at 7:33:28 PM

1. Proprietary Data (Youtube, docs, gmail, cloud logs, waymo, website analytics, ads, search, the list is huge)

2. Commercial Datacenters (theyre ahead at least)

3. Chip production (Google is manufactoring proprietary chips)

4. Consumer OS (Chrome, Andriod)

5. Consumer Hardware (Pixel)

Basically google has access to data that OpenAI will never have access to, can lower costs below what OpenAI can, and is already a leader in all the places OpenAI will need massive capex to catch up.

by bnchrch

3/8/2026 at 8:01:26 PM

You can't train LLMs on proprietary data, at least not if you want to make that LLM as accessible as Gemini. Otherwise random people can ask it your home address.

So it matters less than one would think. Also, ChatGPT can do 'internet search' as a tool already, so it already has access to say Google maps POI database of SMBs.

And ChatGPT also gets a lot of proprietary data of its own as well. People use it as a Google replacement.

by est31

3/8/2026 at 9:54:45 PM

>You can't train LLMs on proprietary data, at least not if you want to make that LLM as accessible as Gemini. Otherwise random people can ask it your home address.

If this is your only criteria I think you have a misunderstanding of what proprietary data is and ways companies can mitigate the situation in the inference stage.

by sillyfluke

3/8/2026 at 7:24:01 PM

the whole of youtube. (including the private stuff.) edit: +gmail/google docs/google drive

by astrophage

3/8/2026 at 7:21:34 PM

e.g. years of tracking: Movement data etc., as simple & first example

by KellyCriterion

3/8/2026 at 7:30:30 PM

Android too.

by wil421

3/8/2026 at 7:22:19 PM

Enterprise Distribution thanks to GCP. Consumer distribution thanks to Android. SMB distribution thanks to GSuite.

And non-western and non-Mandarin language support (the only other competitors are Indian, Emirati, and Saudi sovereign models).

by alephnerd

3/8/2026 at 7:38:35 PM

I'm pretty sure even chatgpt could have told the senior leaders at Google to invest heavily in AI. Not a difficult call to make.

by astral_drama

3/8/2026 at 7:44:26 PM

What if the CEO isn't just telling the company how much to invest, but also has influence on how that money is used? Google's relative success, if it exists, I'd rather not judge, isn't from investing more than everybody else. Because the money just keeps pouring into these things, for all contenders.

by usrusr

3/8/2026 at 7:54:09 PM

> investing more than everybody else

If that's going to decide who wins, Zuckerberg will be the winner. He's been hiring researchers for $100 Million a piece. We'll see soon.

by lateforwork

3/8/2026 at 7:40:36 PM

So Sundar is an AI engineer in his spare time too?

by weare138

3/8/2026 at 6:56:59 PM

> Pichai has been a very poor CEO

Why do you say this? I’m not familiar with him, and really haven’t paid much attention to Google’s strategy beyond cultural awareness, but I think Google has done well with staying competitive in AI, is dominating the self driving battle with Waymo, and has mostly kept its good brand intact (no small feat when you are so big). Are there some big mis-steps I don’t know about?

by pinkmuffinere

3/8/2026 at 7:31:44 PM

Not the person you're replying to, but something that has bothered me about him (and a lot of SV tech), is how they did rapid over-hiring in 2022, then a year later fire a bunch of people, while he claimed he took "full responsibility", but still got a nice happy bonus that year. I'm not sure I know what "taking full responsibility" actually means, because to me it seems like if you have to lay off thousands of people in a year, that would be a good reason to not get a bonus.

These are peoples' lives. People almost certainly quit decent jobs because there was a prestige factor in working for Google, potentially moved to the overpriced world of California, just to be fired less than a year later because apparently Pichai thought that interest rates would never increase and there would be free money for forever. These people have families, and they almost certainly thought that moving to Google would be a "stable" position, because it's one of the biggest SV companies.

I don't know if he's good for the stock price, that's tougher to gauge, but I do think he's a short-sighted jerk.

by tombert

3/8/2026 at 7:34:38 PM

The "I take full responsibility" thing has been entirely meaningless.

I guess it's supposed to convey that it's not the laid-off folks' fault, and that it was "his decision", but as you said: "taking full responsibility" without any real impact to his life? I may as well take full responsibility for the layoffs. It'd mean just as much.

by rkomorn

3/8/2026 at 7:43:04 PM

Yeah, that's the thing; if he's acknowledging that it was his decision to do this, then maybe he shouldn't be getting bonuses and maybe be fired? Why are the regular schmucks the ones being punished for his terrible decisions and not him?

by tombert

3/8/2026 at 8:09:56 PM

Maybe it was the right decision at the time to lay them off? I think that's why he got the bonus, actually! I'm sure the layoff was difficult for him as well: he certainly lost a lot of goodwill with his workforce and I'm sure the internal politics were tricky for anyone involved.

No one is getting "punished" - there was no promise of ten years of employment from Google. Like when an employee leaves, you wouldn't say they're "punishing" the employer.

by tasuki

3/8/2026 at 8:18:15 PM

> Maybe it was the right decision at the time to lay them off?

It probably was the right decision to lay everyone off. What was not the right decision, and this should have been obvious, was hiring 10+k more employees than you actually need because you assume that this free money will last forever. He was almost certainly aware and signed off on this mass hiring. Other companies didn't make this mistake; Tim Cook didn't take a bonus that year to avoid mass layoffs.

> he certainly lost a lot of goodwill with his workforce and I'm sure the internal politics were tricky for anyone involved.

He probably did, because he's a bad CEO. He was right to lose goodwill.

> No one is getting "punished" - there was no promise of ten years of employment from Google.

No, there isn't a legal promise or anything, but people go to these BigCos primarily for stability. If you want an exciting job with lots of interesting new things, it's much easier to find that in a startup, but startups can be frustrating because they're inherently unstable. This is partly why startups tend to be made up of very young people; it's much easier to deal with volatility if you don't have a family.

You're obviously not "entitled" to a job, but the people who run Google aren't complete idiots; they know people are joining BigCo because they think it's going to be relatively stable. They depended on that in order to do all this overhiring.

by tombert

3/8/2026 at 9:02:43 PM

> they know people are joining BigCo because they think it's going to be relatively stable

And after all this, people will think twice whether BigCo is stable. Just as well! If you want stability, look into small family-run companies.

by tasuki

3/8/2026 at 9:25:13 PM

This doesn’t absolve Google at all. They aren’t morons, they know that people joined because of that perceived stability.

by tombert

3/8/2026 at 11:01:05 PM

Well I hope people won't perceive this (nonexistent) stability in the future.

I'm not trying to "absolve" Google, nor do I think they're guilty. They used their reputation to hire people. It turns out that needs to be updated. Perhaps in the future they will do things to improve their reputation again? Who knows...

by tasuki

3/8/2026 at 11:08:47 PM

It just feels a little victim-blamey. Google manipulated thousands of people, and they got screwed in the process. Should they have known that big corporations are evil? Maybe, but I'm not going to blame someone who was misled by dishonest people.

If you're agreeing that they misled people by using their reputation in a way that's dishonest, how are they "not guilty"?

by tombert

3/9/2026 at 1:00:36 PM

I agree Google's reputation misled people. But importantly, I don't think Google can be held accountable for their reputation and for what other people believed.

To give a somewhat contorted example: If people believe you give 1 Bitcoin to anyone who can recite the whole Beowulf, they will perhaps spend a lot of time learning Beowulf, forgoing other things. Then they find out you in fact have not promised them that and that you have no such obligation. I don't think you've misled them! Do they have a right to be angry with you? Or should they have checked with you what the precise conditions were before upending their life?

by tasuki

3/9/2026 at 1:37:53 PM

If I happily let them waste their time reciting Beowulf on purpose under false pretenses then I would be a douchebag.

Google knew that people would join based on a perception of stability. Did they hire 10,000 people knowing that they would fire them six months later? If so, they are jerks. If not, then they are so categorically idiotic as to think that they will just have free money for forever and interest rates would never ever go up. In either situation they are bad.

by tombert

3/8/2026 at 7:05:50 PM

I would argue that Google has had declining quality in search results, bordering on completely unusable in the past few years, and that has resulted in people using LLMs for things that they would have searched for years ago. Although they are competitive in AI, I think it is surprising that their product continues to frustrate people and that they are a distant second place.

by turzmo

3/8/2026 at 7:11:27 PM

Without taking a stance on whether their search has improved or degraded, we can observe that the same claim (“search is so degraded it’s unusable”) has been common for like 5 years at this point. If it’s really such a problem, why haven’t people already switched? Google’s search is at 90% market share [1]. Surely if it was perceived as a problem to customers there should be some measurable effect?

[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share

by pinkmuffinere

3/8/2026 at 7:15:10 PM

The only real competitor is bing (other search engines like DDG are just repackaged bing) and Microsoft is pursuing the same strategy as Google.

by jordanb

3/8/2026 at 7:27:24 PM

What about Kagi?

by replooda

3/8/2026 at 7:29:29 PM

No offense to Kagi, but they don’t rank in the top 6. They are behind even Baidu, which I had forgotten exists. I think they have good mind-share among power users, but probably not in the general population.

by pinkmuffinere

3/8/2026 at 7:49:00 PM

But the question is whether or not Kagi is a competitor — not just in regards to the market share it currently holds, but what it could come to hold. Let's see where it is next year.

by replooda

3/8/2026 at 9:43:44 PM

> But the question is whether or not Kagi is a competitor — not just in regards to the market share it currently holds, but what it could come to hold

The question is who’s a competitor now, right? It’s not “Who will be a competitor in n years”

by pinkmuffinere

3/8/2026 at 7:36:34 PM

Google has succeeded in enshittifying their search in a way that the vast majority of users (not customers -- those are the advertisers) have not noticed.

by turzmo

3/8/2026 at 7:47:32 PM

Do they go away or do they use the weak but good enough (for many) Google LLM response instead?

by usrusr

3/8/2026 at 7:40:00 PM

If the users aren’t bothered by the “enshittification”, does that reflect poorly on the CEO? The CEO is supposed to make money, and maybe has personal aspirations to improve the world. They’re not making art.

by pinkmuffinere

3/9/2026 at 12:04:20 PM

Like I said originally, I think the rise of ChatGPT is a partly a consequence of this. It’s not that people are choosing a different search engine, they’re not searching at all because LLMs will give a better answer faster.

Also, whether it’s ChatGPT or something else, five years is really not that long. Time will tell, but does it really seem like decreasing quality in the name of profits is such a good long-term strategy?

by turzmo

3/8/2026 at 7:00:21 PM

Sundar was at the helm when the decision to worsen search results for the sake of ad revenue was made.

Previously, the two concerns were "firewalled" so as to prevent the money-generating side of the company from eroding the user experience.

This is a theme that's been at the core of every Titan of Industry's decline. That is: chasing of short-term results with disregard for the long term consequences. Alphabet is just so big and dominate in search that it will likely take quite a long time for the negative effects to appear. And they have other large businesses that haven't been as aggressively enshitified (Youtube, GCP).

See Intel, Boeing, GE etc.

by rybosworld

3/8/2026 at 7:43:48 PM

It's like when the Titanic struck the iceberg and the crew mostly thought the ship would be fine.

Just because they're still making money doesn't mean the company hasn't already been damaged beyond repair. But in this case by the time it's clear the damage is fatal, those at the helm have jumped ship with piles of cash.

by gtowey

3/8/2026 at 7:46:41 PM

They missed the boat with ChatGPT, the research paper for it initially came from Google. There's no real focus between Android, ChromeOS, and Fuschia. The AI results box was possible a decade ago, but not giving money to the sites the info was gotten from was too far a stretch. How I feel is that the company doesn't really know what it's doing, there's no real leadership. KilledByGoogle is a website. With Stadia the technology was there but didn't have the right backing to make it in the market. Though it turns out those GPUs are useful for GCP for AI, so that might have been the real reason. He's just not much of a leader. He doesn't need to go full Elon, but some amount of character would be nice.

by fragmede

3/8/2026 at 7:20:21 PM

I don't like him either but he is definitely exchanging Google's future positions and cashing it in for profit now, which reflects positively on him.

by nashashmi

3/8/2026 at 7:01:02 PM

>> Pichai has been a very poor CEO and then immediately follows with "but Google's position was so strong".

Isn't it a CEO's job to make sure the company's position is strong among other responsibilities?

by dwa3592

3/8/2026 at 7:06:08 PM

I believe that the parent comment is saying Google was in a strong position before Pichal took over.

by MikeNotThePope

3/8/2026 at 7:15:26 PM

I think this refers less so on "Pichai did a great job" and more that Google is in a good position right now. One COULD say that Pichai is responsible for this - but probably many other semi-competent CEOs could have done about an equally solid job here. Google would have profited either way.

by shevy-java

3/8/2026 at 7:18:56 PM

I remember Pichai mainly for his "AI now first everything" in 2015, destroying Google search as a reliable channel to acquisit users somehow for free.

by KellyCriterion

3/8/2026 at 7:33:26 PM

That may have been bad for users, but you can hardly claim it was bad for the company - not even in the long run. Ten years is like 40% of Google's lifetime, that is the long run! And if indeed he went all-in on AI in 2015, that seems to me like a damn near prophetic vision. Dislike AI by all means, but you can't say it's not the Current Big Thing or that Google is doing badly because of it. To see that coming so early as 2015 looks rather skilful to me.

I did not know this about Pichai and if true, it makes me feel rather better about his leadership.

by kingofmen

3/9/2026 at 4:59:06 PM

Not sure if the days of SEO spam where that much worse than todays AI spam? :-D

by KellyCriterion

3/8/2026 at 7:51:27 PM

> if indeed he went all-in on AI in 2015, that seems to me like a damn near prophetic vision.

Also note that 7 years later, when ChatGPT came out, built on top of Google Brain research (transformers), Google was caught flat-footed.

Even supposing that Pichai really had the right vision a decade ago, he completely failed in leading its execution until a serious threat to the company's core business model materialized.

by vitus

3/8/2026 at 7:14:28 PM

I kind of agree. Google's trajectory is going upwards. Unfortunately so.

by shevy-java

3/8/2026 at 7:04:00 PM

Pichai is being evaluated for his effect on stock price. His shareholders don't care if every product and service they offer has gotten worse for users in the meantime.

Gemini keeping pace with Claude and ChatGPT is clearly some kind of management victory, because Zuckerberg and Musk don't seem to be able to do it despite having limitless cash to spend.

by smt88

3/8/2026 at 7:11:50 PM

Don't give Pichai credit for that. Google had the strongest ML research org on the planet before he took over, and it had Demis, arguably the best researcher in the field (and it had Geoffrey Hinton before that). The fact that goog was so far behind OAI despite Demis blazing frontiers was a major management failure.

Sundar's enshittification has also juiced short term share prices at the cost of long term health. It might turn out to be a decent decision for search because it's in the midst of being disrupted, but that's a happy accident for Sundar, not 4d chess (and you can argue the enshittification hastened the disruption).

by CuriouslyC

3/8/2026 at 7:42:03 PM

naive question: which product and service has gotten worse?

Like they removed the youtube dislike button

what else?

Everything seems to be getting better. Tying incentives to Waymo is almost unfair because Waymo is amazing and just keeps getting better.

by JCharante

3/8/2026 at 10:49:53 PM

Text search (without Gemini) and Gmail are much worse than they used to be. Android is less open, Chrome doesn't allow proper ad-blocking, YouTube has insane ads if you don't have Premium.

by smt88

3/8/2026 at 7:11:02 PM

Pichai has been a terrible CEO, he almost lost the AI race before it started because he was too focused on Google’s consumer products.

I was shocked they kept him around. He’s very much just a money manager like Tim Cook or Steve Ballmer.

Those types are great in the short term but risk the entire company’s future long term

by mountainriver

3/8/2026 at 7:13:03 PM

I'm surprised people still think this. Google has the strongest position of any company in the world on AI. They have expertise and capability across the entire stack from chips to data centers to fundamental research to frontier models. Just because they weren't first-to-market with a chatbot doesn't mean they almost lost or made some terrible durable blunder.

That's about Google, though. The picture about Sundar specifically is harder to evaluate. The pessimistic take is that Google had that position already and Sundar failed to proactively lead through a fundamental product shift, forcing the company onto the defensive for some time. The optimistic take is that Sundar, having occupied the top spot since 2015, prioritized investments in the company's overall technology development, then successfully executed a rapid product pivot when the market changed, securing a dominant position in both research and product that nobody else can compete with long-term.

by nilkn

3/9/2026 at 9:41:19 PM

People give him way too many breaks, he's a money manager. He was asleep at the wheel when OpenAI absolutely steamrolled them, even though they very easily could have won that race.

by mountainriver

3/8/2026 at 7:17:50 PM

All of Google's advantages in AI are despite Sundar Pichai's leadership, not because of it.

by loudmax

3/8/2026 at 7:19:23 PM

That's not clear to me. He's been in charge for over a decade, and the company he's in charge of has the most dominant position in AI in the world.

by nilkn

3/8/2026 at 7:36:47 PM

absolutely no one is smart or productive enough to justify $692m in pay. they could hire thousands of engineers for that money.

by y0ssar1an

3/8/2026 at 7:52:30 PM

ya i could hire 500 min wage baseball players to replace ohtani then.

by gdilla

3/8/2026 at 8:09:31 PM

Isn't that the plot of Moneyball? You'll almost never find a single player with 30 stolen bases and 30 HR both, but you can find two players with 30 stolen bases and 30 HR alone for cheaper.

by haunter

3/8/2026 at 7:52:44 PM

That’s not for you to decide. It’s for the people with the $692m to decide.

by periodjet

3/8/2026 at 9:14:19 PM

He runs the 2nd most valuable company in the world, and the company is most profitable company ever.

Giving him 700m in stock to keep him around is worth it for both the investors and employees.

by impulser_

3/8/2026 at 10:38:02 PM

Isn't Google famous for the investors and the employees both being entirely powerless?

by spwa4

3/8/2026 at 11:27:57 PM

They spend 25b a year on stock compensation. Giving your CEO ~230m of that is probably okay.

by impulser_

3/8/2026 at 7:59:18 PM

> absolutely no one is smart or productive enough to justify $692m in pay.

Upper management isn't paid based on how smart or productive they are. Google has like 400 billion yearly revenue. A CEOs decisions have enormous consequences, if a CEO can make slightly better decisions than another, it'd be easy to justify $692m in pay.

That said, I don't believe Sundar Pichai is a great CEO. He's might be an ok bean-counter, not sure, but I'm pretty sure one can get cheaper bean-counters.

> they could hire thousands of engineers for that money.

Yes and pray what would they do with them?

by tasuki

3/8/2026 at 7:51:33 PM

The market disagrees.

by jstummbillig

3/8/2026 at 10:30:49 PM

Is this what motivates Sundar Pichai to work harder for Google? More money? Surely there's nothing he could want that he doesn't already have.

I understand it's insulting to be paid less than other CEOs, and I get that it's a way of keeping score.

All the same I think he's doing it for the power, the respect, the fame. Would he have walked away if the number was only $100m? Would that have been rational?

by fancyfredbot

3/9/2026 at 12:21:00 AM

> Is this what motivates Sundar Pichai to work harder for Google? More money? Surely there's nothing he could want that he doesn't already have.

I think the confusion stems from mapping normal people money usage on people, that have much more money than they can use on themselves: They don't do that. You can use excess money to make things happen as you see fit.

Money enables you to do things in the world, and if you want to do things in the world, a few hundred million are very easily spent. I am sure most people around here would have no trouble allocating that amount of money towards something they would like to see happen or improved, and that's how a lot of money, that someone does not feel they need, is used.

by jstummbillig

3/9/2026 at 4:54:39 AM

Sergey said that Google was able to rapidly respond to ChatGPT because Sundar had already invested a lot into AI.

They have the people, the models and the chips. And Sundar helped achieve that.

That's what he said on some podcast.

by returnInfinity

3/9/2026 at 1:20:02 PM

I forgot how to count that low...

by yablak

3/8/2026 at 11:30:53 PM

Companies structure is much more monarchic than almost all regimes in history. CEOs stand in the top position like Gods, having full power at will, and then all the others follow as his workers. He can easily earn multiple times more than the next highest in the company because his responsibility is elevated. So, the company can afford to pay huge sum to one person because he is the only one that is able to bring in multiples of this (eg fire people, increase the stock price, prepare for a sale off). Companies are not democracies, not even monarchies, they are machines with a single brain for strategy: the CEO's.

by tsoukase

3/8/2026 at 6:58:43 PM

Can we please, please move past this generation of bean-counter CEOs. Google and Apple have done great things under Pichai and Cook, and yet I couldn't been less excited for what either is doing.

Bring back experimental culture.

by laborcontract

3/8/2026 at 7:07:47 PM

Say what you will about Zuckerberg, but at least he tried to burn untold billions on something that was potentially slightly exciting.

We should be grateful for funding of the research, and that it didn't pay off in market results. More of this!

by fidotron

3/8/2026 at 7:55:31 PM

Big time agree. I don't like the person, but i have great respect for his fearless capex spending.

by laborcontract

3/8/2026 at 7:13:33 PM

I agree with the sentiment.

Experimental culture is inherently risky though, and risk is not something you want too much of as a public company as your shareholders can and will be very loud.

They do still experiment but in their R&D divisions so as to shield their cash cows from risk as well as to be able to better conceal how much money they’re pouring into moonshots so as not to spook investors.

Waymo is the most recent moonshot I can remember going out of Google X, and they’re arguably a leader in the space. There are other projects in the works, and many more failed ones.

by giwook

3/8/2026 at 7:05:31 PM

Look to smaller more focused companies for that

by darepublic

3/8/2026 at 7:04:39 PM

Gemini, Waymo, and Wing are very experimental

by smt88

3/8/2026 at 7:27:04 PM

More than an order of magnitude smaller than Tesla's deal with their CEO.

by delichon

3/8/2026 at 7:48:56 PM

3 orders of magnitude, right? 1e9 vs 1e12

by Tempest1981

3/8/2026 at 7:20:45 PM

There's a strong smell coming out of that wealth gap now.

by amelius

3/8/2026 at 8:30:11 PM

Google has substantially caught up on AI and between their existing monopolies, capital, access to data, and ability to sell to existing cloud or Google apps customers, they’re going to become richer and more powerful than ever.

This type of concentration makes it so that there’s no working competition element to the economy. Mega corps should be broken up and also charged absurdly high tax rates to fix this.

by SilverElfin

3/8/2026 at 7:55:54 PM

Google should fire Sundar and make Denis CEO

by option

3/9/2026 at 2:04:19 PM

It's Demis, not Denis.

I don't think Demis wants to be CEO of all of Google. He wants to focus on DeepMind and AI. He has a life goal of inventing AGI and using that to solve the world's biggest problems. Leading Google gets him further not closer. He doesn't give a shit about ads and ads is Google's biggest money maker.

by nojvek

3/8/2026 at 7:13:56 PM

Evil pays well.

We need to find alternatives to Google - that giant is out of control now.

by shevy-java

3/8/2026 at 7:33:27 PM

Kagi is pretty decent, though I think they proxy to Google's index for at least some of their results.

by tombert

3/8/2026 at 7:38:40 PM

Adding on to it, They use SerpAPI which (sort of) scrapes google and then they do their work on top and this is also how they allow your customizability features to be added too in search if i remember correctly.

Kagi is great if you need great customizability and filters and if you wish to support the future of Kagi/products like these.

And Duckduckgo is great if you need a Google alternative which "just works" without costing money* if you are frugal.

Either way, both options are good and its best to leave Google if/when possible.

The best feature of both of these and brave-search to some degree is that all three support bangs. !yt leads to youtube and !hn leads to hn.algolia.com :) and !sr and so so many more. Bangs might be the best feature that google users might be missing. It just saves so much time.

by Imustaskforhelp

3/8/2026 at 7:33:31 PM

Well here are 8 search engines that I know that I did something recently with[0]

1. DDG (Duckduckgo) 2. Kagi 3. Brave (Independent) 4. Ecosia (Looking to be independent with Qwant in future) 5. Startpage 6. Marginalia (Independent and creator is on HN) 7. Mojeek (Independent) 8. Yandex.ru (Russian, Independent)

I personally use DDG (Duckduckgo). I think its a decent option fwiw, yes I know it uses Bing internally but it works really great.

> Evil pays well.

It isn't that Evil pays well although one can say that but rather that, Short term profits seem to pay well.

Although Google now has a decent AI model, Their search engine which I don't use aside from some image search sometimes, is getting worse, (maybe because that somehow helps them short term) because fwiw, their stock price isn't really correlated anymore with how good their search is, because you can bet that if that was the case, Google would throw everything to become best search engine.

These corporations are so locked in/monopolistic that unless you change your search engine/(In case of Microsoft operating system), they don't really care about how much worse their product becomes and sometimes even if people stop using their product, short term, they still don't care.

[0]: what I did: https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=47232986

by Imustaskforhelp

3/8/2026 at 7:26:11 PM

[dead]

by throwaway613746

3/8/2026 at 6:54:06 PM

Is this the highest paid CEO anywhere (bar Elon)?

by brcmthrowaway

3/8/2026 at 7:44:09 PM

worth it

by semiinfinitely

3/8/2026 at 7:16:29 PM

I honestly have NOTHING against that: they are a private company, their money, their choice. I have plenty of other bones to pick with them, regarding the harvesting of personal data from smart devices and cloud services, how it's used, and so on, but the salaries of their executives are their own money, so it's their business and I don't see any reason for controversy. In fact, if they happen to lose talents because of their policies or ruin themselves over certain massive salaries, that's their problem, all the better.

Unfortunately, most people seem incapable of attacking what actually needs to be attacked, instead of getting hung up on things that are perfectly legitimate.

by kkfx

3/8/2026 at 7:17:54 PM

They are a public company.

by vasco

3/8/2026 at 7:39:37 PM

Private in that they're not owned by the taxpayers or government. Amtrak would be an example of a "public" company in the sense that I believe that the poster was describing.

by tombert

3/9/2026 at 6:16:46 AM

These words have meaning already, and what they said makes no sense due to that. A public company has many obligations a private company doesn't, and more limitations on what it can do.

by vasco

3/8/2026 at 7:18:29 PM

> they are a private company

They are a public company

by khazhoux

3/8/2026 at 7:22:14 PM

Sorry I'm European, I mean "private" in the sense "not a Public Body", they are a company whose board has approved the remuneration using the company's own funds, meaning that the majority of shareholders are happy with this pay package.

by kkfx

3/9/2026 at 6:17:30 AM

The meaning is the same in "European". I'm Portuguese.

by vasco

3/9/2026 at 6:27:51 AM

I'm French and the meaning is similar to what OP described in French "European".

by rkomorn

3/8/2026 at 10:42:25 PM

[dead]

by eboy

3/8/2026 at 7:00:51 PM

[flagged]

by geetee

3/8/2026 at 7:06:48 PM

Where else would they park their wealth? Stock market is all imaginary money. Maybe gold/silver. But housing works as an easy way to park wealth in a tangible way that's guarded against inflation. This fact is probably also why housing prices keep going up.

by krackers

3/8/2026 at 7:18:08 PM

Funny how it's never crypto. They always choose non-technical investments for their own wealth.

by 1970-01-01

3/8/2026 at 7:38:18 PM

These ultra wealthy folks don’t need highly volatile investments like crypto. They are mostly seeking to reduce volatility rather than hit home runs.

by compiler-guy

3/8/2026 at 7:25:50 PM

1: Location saves time to do the stuff you want to be doing.

2: Space for activities, such as being able to host large parties, friends, family, etc..

3: Convenience and time saving from having a lot of things in-house: gym, pool, tennis courts, etc.

4: Security. When everyone knows who you are, they begin to make up excuses to get close to you and yours. Even if you don't want seclusion, you may be forced into it.

5: The people who you hang out with most have big mansions too - you want them to be just as comfortable visiting you as when you are when you visit them.

by givemeethekeys

3/8/2026 at 7:22:18 PM

I used to ask myself the same question, but then I realized that for these people it doesn't matter how much they spend. When you are worth billions of dollars, the difference between spending $10M or $50M on your home Does Not Matter. You still have many other $M to spend on other things. It's perfectly rational for them to spend what seems like a large amount of money for an apparently small marginal improvement.

by egl2020

3/8/2026 at 7:30:46 PM

I don't know about Pichai in particular but whenever rich people do things that don't make sense the answer is usually tax avoidance or financial engineering.

If you have many shares concentrated in a particular company that you can't or don't want to sell for legal or tax reasons, you can borrow money to buy a house. As long as you service the interest you get a house without having to sell too many shares and trigger tax obligations.

Home loans are also nice because they are a form of leverage that is secured against an asset but is not subject to margin calls if the value of that asset falls.

by zarzavat

3/8/2026 at 7:15:10 PM

Are you referring to the Florida purchases mentioned in the article? There might be some hidden tax reasons for those.

by gniv

3/8/2026 at 7:50:55 PM

Property appreciates over time. It's a cheat-code for more money, not a wasteful expense.

by mrkeen

3/8/2026 at 7:43:10 PM

compare that behaviour with Warren Buffet or Charlie Munger. They wanted more money only to pursue their other interests. They succeeded in earning more money than imaginable.

by ghywertelling

3/8/2026 at 7:11:13 PM

You don't get to enjoy your single family home because you're at work all the time. The ultra-rich don't have that problem.

by delusional

3/8/2026 at 7:14:35 PM

I always got the impression these ultra rich are workaholics that barely see their family.

by geetee

3/8/2026 at 7:37:49 PM

I don't think so; I know a lot of them are in charge of multiple companies, which sounds like they work a lot, but I think it signals just as much that CEO really isn't that hard of a job.

Elon is the CEO of like four or five companies I think, while also ostensibly heading a government agency. If you can have four or five full time jobs, then they are not full time jobs.

Given that, I suspect that they're able to find plenty of time for themselves.

by tombert

3/8/2026 at 7:15:46 PM

I have not heard anyone of the superrich who stays at home on the sofa; maybe there are some rich Influencers these days who are more "consumption heavy", but what I can judge is even these guys pump out stuff on a more or less professional level, meaning they cant do it as a hobby.

by KellyCriterion

3/8/2026 at 7:07:49 PM

have you ever been in one of these mansions? my hot take is people seriously underestimate how great being rich is, and how enjoyable some ocean side mansions are

by mikert89

3/8/2026 at 7:13:25 PM

Ah, that's why the lifetime earnings for a big tech CEO is about 50-100mm. It's enough to afford one of these mansions and a few additional properties around the world -- about as much wealth as any individual human being needs or could possibly spend in one lifetime.

Right?

by mlsu

3/8/2026 at 7:14:40 PM

[flagged]

by KellyCriterion

3/8/2026 at 6:51:36 PM

So what's the reason? Another massive layoff coming up for Google?

by spwa4

3/8/2026 at 7:01:04 PM

> most of it is tied to performance, including new stock incentives linked to Waymo and its drone delivery venture Wing

by pajamasam

3/8/2026 at 6:46:46 PM

Regular IT workers should be grateful they earn substantially more than a teacher or a nurse /s. The fact that labour cost is disconnected from the value it generates is probably one of the greatest scams pulled on working class.

99% of his pay packet should be redistributed among workers.

by varispeed

3/8/2026 at 6:53:54 PM

Isn’t Google just distributing varying proportions of a pseudo-monopoly rent? It doesn’t seem like the CEO is really contributing that much to the company, but most of the individual contributors seem to be compensated disproportionately relative to their quality of work (as well).

by nickff

3/8/2026 at 7:16:52 PM

How will shortages be avoided if pay isn’t deterred by supply and demand? An industry that needs workers raises wages until satisfied, what magical thinking do you propose instead

by daedrdev

3/8/2026 at 7:41:01 PM

Every cost is disconnected from the value it generates. Do you pay the price for gasoline, electricity, or food based on the value it provides you?

by mcntsh

3/8/2026 at 7:01:35 PM

> The fact that labour cost is disconnected from the value it generates

It's not disconnected from its value in the market, I don't think. I think the great scam is telling people that capitalist values are in any way attached to human values.

by ambicapter

3/8/2026 at 10:07:06 PM

The problem is it's quite a bit more challenging to agree on prices for exchange denominated in human values.

There is no common currency.

by s1artibartfast

3/9/2026 at 3:23:05 PM

We don't have to do it, I'm not arguing that market pricing should be changed.

I just want people to stop pretending they're related.

by ambicapter

3/8/2026 at 6:54:17 PM

Depends on the country, in some we're just plain office workers like everyone else.

by pjmlp

3/8/2026 at 7:06:04 PM

Isn't Sundar a worker? We are talking about his pay from negotiation with capital owners

by s1artibartfast

3/8/2026 at 7:18:06 PM

He's probably muttering "I have nothing to lose but my chains" as he's hand-washing his Che Guevara shirt.

by chihuahua

3/8/2026 at 7:45:09 PM

to be fair it's possible Sundar is unhappy and just wants to enjoy his wealth but it's hard to say no to $200m/yr

by JCharante

3/8/2026 at 7:38:49 PM

> Isn't Sundar a worker

Executives are not workers, no

by bluefirebrand