General
April 24, 2021
6 minutes read

Google Execs Draw Big Paydays In 2020

Google is one of the world’s biggest technology companies with over $180 billion in revenue last year and its top…

Google Chief Business Officer Philipp Schindler

Google is one of the world’s biggest technology companies with over $180 billion in revenue last year and its top executives have generally enjoyed big annual paydays due to that. In 2020, it was no exception to the previous years as an annual proxy filing recently filed by Google indicates big paydays for some of its top brass.

In 2020, Google’s listed highest-paid executive was Chief Business Officer Philipp Schindler who got $66.4 million. It’s the first time that Google has revealed his pay since he assumed his role in 2015.

After Schindler, Google’s second-highest paid executive in 2020 was its newly promoted Search boss Prabhakar Raghavan who earned cash and stock worth $55.3 million. Raghavan was promoted to his role after a Google leadership shakeup last year that brought the company’s Search, Assistant, and Ads executives to report to him.

Other highly paid executives at Google include its Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat who earned $51 million in 2020 and Chief Legal Officer Kent Walker who earned roughly the same amount.

Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai made do with a much smaller $7.4 million in compensation last year compared to the rest of his C-suite reports. However, he earned a $281 million payday in 2019 that dwarfs the paydays of his C-suite reports for collective years.

The vast majority of the compensation for Google executives was made with stock awards. Out of the company’s C-suite, CEO Pichai had the highest base salary of $2 million while the rest got around $650,000 each.

In 2020, Pichai’s personal security expense tab picked up by Google parent Alphabet was $5.4 million and that made up the majority of his compensation.

Google’s annual revenue in 2020 was up 13% compared to the previous year and the stock price of its parent firm Alphabet grew 26% during the year. With that, it doesn’t seem like Alphabet shareholders will balk at the paydays of the company’s top brass.