There are plenty of examples of entrepreneurs who’ve amassed great wealth, but Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai has gotten there without ever founding a company.
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai is on the cusp of becoming a billionaire after a surge in the price of Google shares. Google’s shares rose nearly 10 percent after their latest earnings report, which has raised Pichai’s personal net worth to close to $1 billionaire (Rs. 8,300 crore) in the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. This will be the first time that the Google CEO will touch the billion-dollar milestone.
Pichai currently holds Google stock worth $424 million. He has also earned roughly $600 million from share sales since he became Google’s CEO in 2015. Google’s stock is up 400 percent since Pichai took office.
This is a fairly remarkable journey for Pichai, who was born in 1972 in a middle class family in Chennai. He had attended PSBB Nungambakkam, and was also an active cricket player. Pichai had gone on to finish a degree in Metallury from IIT Kharagpur, and then did an MS in Material Sciences and Engineering from Stanford. He had also finished an MBA from Wharton. In 2004, he’d joined Google, and in 2008, was responsible for introducing Google’s Chrome browser. He continued rising up the ranks, and was appointed the company’s CEO in 2015.
Pichai is now nearly a billionaire. This is a far cry from his upbringing in Chennai, where growing up his family didn’t have a car or TV, and at times didn’t even have running water. But through his hard work and skills, he’s managed to touch the elusive billion-dollar milestone. Which just goes to show that you don’t need to take massive risks and become an entrepreneur to be fabulously wealthy — putting your head down and working hard at your career can get you there too.