From 2-room Chennai house to 10-figure fortune, Google's Sundar Pichai nears a rare milestone

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai is nearing a rare milestone for a non-founder in the tech industry: A billion-dollar fortune. 

Since taking charge of Google in 2015, Pichai, 51, has seen a remarkable run, with the company’s stock soaring over 400%, outpacing the S&P 500 and Nasdaq indices. The rise is further fueled by the recent surge in AI-driven growth in Google’s cloud computing unit, with the company’s first-quarter earnings surpassing expectations and introducing a dividend for the first time.

The rally in Google’s stock has propelled Pichai’s wealth to nearly $1 billion, as reported by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Pichai has often talked about how he grew up in a two-room apartment in Chennai where he and his younger brother slept on the living-room floor. The Pichais didn’t have a television or a car, at times, they didn’t even have running water. 

A rotary telephone his father got when Pichai was 12 introduced him to technology. That, along with a curiosity about his father’s job as an electrical engineer for British firm GEC, inspired him to study technology. 

The curiosity landed him a spot at the prestigious IIT Kharagpur and then he won a scholarship to Stanford University. Pichai, in one of his interviews, has mentioned how his father withdrew $1,000 from the family’s savings — more than his annual salary — to cover the cost of Pichai’s plane ticket and other expenses. 

“My dad and mom did what a lot of parents did at the time,” Pichai said in a 2014 interview. “They sacrificed a lot of their life and used a lot of their disposable income to make sure their children were educated.”

He won another scholarship to Wharton before joining Google in 2004, where he reportedly began quickly leading important projects, including the launch of Google Chrome. In 2015, co-founder Larry Page announced that he was transferring to becoming CEO of newly created parent-company Alphabet, while Pichai was promoted to CEO of Google. 

By 2019, he was named as CEO of Alphabet, and with the stock options he became one of the highest paid executives in the world, with a reported compensation in 2022 exceeding $200 million. According to Bloomberg, his current net worth is made up of $424 million in share holdings, and around $600 million in share sales since he became Google CEO.