Google's India-born CEO Sundar Pichai gets a record stock grant of $199 million

Making him the highest-paid executive of a public traded company in the US, Indian-born Google Inc’s Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai has received restricted stock units worth $199 million or nearly Rs 1,356 crore, as per the regulatory filing made by Google parent company Alphabet Inc. [caption id=“attachment_2618274” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Google CEO Sundar Pichai[/caption] Pichai, who took over in August, received a grant for 273,328 Class C Google stock units on February 3. The valuation is based on the stock’s closing price on that date. On the same day, Pichai sold 375 Class A common shares at a price of $786.28 each, and sold another 3,625 Class C capital stock at a price of $768.84 each, the filing said. It is the most lucrative award ever handed to a Google executive, according to a Bloomberg data analysis. The Class C shares can be availed in quarterly increments through till 2019, provided the Google CEO remains at his position till then. Pichai, who was promoted from Larry Page’s deputy to Google CEO over summer, remains in his position for at least three years, the Bloomberg report said. It is not uncommon with Google to award executives restricted stock about once every two years in a bid to motivate and take a long-term view of the business. The financial publication also notes the Alphabet filing revealed the company awarded $42.8 million (roughly Rs 291 crore) in restricted stock to Diane Greene, former CEO of VMware, who is in charge of cloud business since November. Ruth Porat, CFO of Alphabet, was given $38.3 million (roughly Rs 261 crore) worth of equity, according to the filing. It equity will vest under the same conditions as Pichai for Porat - in quarterly increments till 2019 if she remains on the job. According to a report in US-based Mail online, Alphabet overtook Apple to become the world’s most valuable public company on February 1 after it reported better-than-expected quarterly revenue. It reported a rise in profit to $4.9 billion, up from $4.7 billion in the same period last year, boosted by strong sales of advertising on mobile devices and YouTube. At Google he has been one of the driving forces behind Gmail and Google Maps, and has headed up the development side of Chrome and Chrome OS. With inputs from Agencies