Quicksplained: Who is Nikesh Arora, the Indian-origin CEO who earns more than Sundar Pichai and Mark Zuckerberg?

It’s not Mark Zuckerberg, nor Sundar Pichai but an Indian-origin CEO, Nikesh Arora, who has earned the second spot on The Wall Street Journal’s 2023 list of highest-paid CEOs in the United States.   

With a career, that includes several high-profile roles in tech and financial sectors, Palo Alto Network CEO’s hefty pay cheque of $151.43 million (around Rs 1,257 crore) in 2023 is significantly more than many high-profile tech executives such as Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s $24.40 million (Rs 203 crore) and Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s $8.8 million (Rs 66.67 crore).

Among those of Indian-origin, 17 made it into the top 500 — Shantanu Narayen of Adobe came in at number 11 with a compensation of $44.93 million.

More from Explainers

How ChatGPT is becoming everyone’s BFF and why that’s dangerous This Week in Explainers: How recovering from Gen-Z protests is a Himalayan task for Nepal

Arora ranks second only to Malaysian-born Chinese-American executive Hock Tan, the CEO of Broadcom, a leading semiconductor manufacturing company. 

But who is Nikesh Arora? Here’s a closer look at his journey   

2. Nikesh Arora hails from Ghaziabad in Uttar Pradesh and received his early education at Delhi’s Air Force School, owing to his father’s service in the Indian Air Force. He completed his undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (BHU) Varanasi in 1989.

3. After a brief nine-month stint at Wipro where he worked promoting computers to various government ministries, Arora relocated to the United States in 1990 to obtain an MBA from Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. Arora describes his first experience in the US as “overwhelming”.
   

4. Struggling to find jobs after graduation, Arora said he wrote around 400 application letters to different companies, before he was placed at American multinational Fidelity Investments in 1992, where he assumed roles in finance and technology management. Concurrently, he pursued a Master of Science (MS) in Finance from Boston University. Arora ultimately rose to the position of vice president of Fidelity Technologies.

5. After switching jobs from Fidelity to Putnam, the 56-year-old began to feel itchy, saying, “he didn’t know what he wanted to do” in 1999. After much deliberation, he started a mobile data business, the European telecom giant Deutsche Telekom, and launched T-Motion in 2000. Arora also held the position of chief marketing officer for the T-Mobile International Division of Deutsche Telekom AG, before his big break at Silicon Valley.

6. Arora got a job at Google in 2004. Jonathan Rosenberg, who is a former senior vice president of product management at Google and who conducted Arora’s interview said he was struck by Arora’s “presence and gravitas when he [came] into a room”. “What was surprising was how insightful he was at the nascent stages of this market, when he wasn’t really in the market. He was the analyst who studied my industry but knew it better than I did. I don’t think I succeeded in throwing him off his game, and I usually do,” he added.

7. During his 10 years at Google, Arora held major positions such as vice president of Europe operations, president of Europe, Middle East and Africa, and ultimately, senior vice president and chief business officer. By 2012, he became the firm’s highest-paid executive after getting a compensation package worth about $51 million on his way to collecting stock awards worth at least $200 million by the time he left in 2014.

8. In the same year, SoftBank Group Corp’s Masayoshi Son himself recruited Arora and within the first year, he amassed a $135 million compensation package as vice chairman of the group and CEO of SoftBank Internet and Media that broke Japanese records and made him the world’s best-paid executive. At one point, he was touted as the legendary investor’s likely successor. However, in June 2016, Arora surprised everyone when is abruptly resigned from his role, and went to join Palo Alto Networks two years later.

9. Arora, who now works as the chairman-CEO of California-based multinational firm Palo Alto Networks, has a millionaire dollar pay cheque. The company justified his compensation, saying the executive has a ‘strong performance’. “Because of this significant vested ownership and the amount that Mr Arora was projected to vest in over the next several years, the Board determined that a meaningful equity award would be necessary to ensure that such award retains and engages Mr Arora,” it said. As per the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Arora’s net worth stood at $1.5 billion in January. 

With input from agencies