Who is Sundar Pichai?
Pichai Sundararajan – better known as Sundar Pichai – was born in Madras, Eastern India, in 1972. He grew up in a practicing Hindu family and hoped to become an International Cricket player. He lived with his parents in a two-bedroom apartment in the city. His father was an electrical engineer and owned a business that made electrical components.
The family did not have a car or television, and he recalled the first phone being brought into his home when he was 12 years old.
Who is Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai?
Sundar Pichai is an Indian-American business executive.
He is the chief executive officer of Alphabet Inc. as well as of Google.
Pichai was born in Madras, India, and studied engineering at IIT Kharagpur.
He then moved to the US where he studied at Stanford University and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
Pichai was included in Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in 2016 and 2020.
What is Sundar Pichai’s net worth?
Sundar Pichai’s net worth is $600million (£433million) according to Celebrity Net Worth.
How much does he earn as the boss of Google?
In 2020 he received an annual salary of $2million (£1.4million) as well as a $240million (£173million) stock package.
What jobs did Sundar Pichai do before being CEO of Alphabet?
Pichai began his career as a materials engineer.
He worked a short stint at the management consulting firm McKinsey & Co., before joining Google in 2004.
He is credited with being largely responsible for Google Drive and oversaw the development of Gmail and Google Maps.
Who is he married to?
Pichai married Anjali Pichai after they met at the Indian Institute of Technology and began dating.
She is a chemical engineer and both now live in the US and are American citizens, according to Pichai’s interview with Amol Rajan for BBC Two.
When Sundar moved to the US to study at Stanford, Anjali stayed in India and the couple would go up to six months without speaking due to not being able to afford international calls.
She moved to the US to begin her career in the 1990s, and they now have two teenage children, a son named Kavya and a daughter named Kiran.
Sudar credits his wife for his success at Google, as he said she convinced him to stay with the company when he received lucrative offers from competitors Twitter and Yahoo.
Controversies
Since he was appointed CEO, Pichai has come under fire for several of his professional decisions.
During Trump’s presidency, he was accused of running a Democratic-supporting narrative on Google’s search engines. In 2018, he had to provide testimony to the US Congressional Committee that his employees could not affect the search engine in a politically bias way.
In 2017, he also caused controversy when he fired a Google employee for writing a manifesto that criticized the company’s diversity policies.
The employee stated, “distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and … these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership.”
Pichai sacked the employee, who suggested men were more biologically adapt to working for the company at a superior level, saying “to suggest a group of our colleagues has traits that make them less biologically suited to that work is offensive and not OK”.
