Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai becomes billionaire after decade leading the firm

By Hien Nguyen July 25, 2025 | 04:03 am PT

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google’s parent firm Alphabet, has joined the billionaire club with a net worth of US$1.1 billion, nearly a decade after taking on the role.

His rise comes as Alphabet’s stock is closing in on a record high, Bloomberg reported. The company’s shares surged as much as 4.1% on Thursday after it delivered better-than-expected revenue and profit for the second quarter.

Since early 2023, Alphabet has added more than $1 trillion in market value, gaining roughly 120% for shareholders.

Pichai owns a 0.02% economic stake in Alphabet, valued at around $440 million. Most of his wealth, however, comes from stock sales and performance-based pay accumulated over the past decade, according to the Times of India.

He has sold more than $650 million worth of shares during that time. Had he held on to all of his stock, his stake would now be worth more than $2.5 billion.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai gestures to the crowd during Google's annual I/O developers conference in Mountain View, California on May 20, 2025. Photo by AFP

Reaching billionaire status as a non-founding CEO is a rare feat, especially in the tech sector, where many top executives built their fortunes through founding equity stakes.

Though Pichai was not one of the company’s founders, he became its longest-serving CEO this month and is set to mark his 10th anniversary in the role next month.

Born and raised in a middle-class family in Chennai, India, Pichai had limited access to technology but was drawn to its ability to connect people, according to Forbes. He once recalled that his father used an entire year’s earnings to buy him a plane ticket to California so he could attend Stanford University in 1993.

Pichai joined Google in 2004, reportedly interviewing on the same day Gmail launched. He rose through the ranks and became CEO in 2015, as the company restructured to become a subsidiary of the newly formed Alphabet. In 2019, he was appointed CEO of Alphabet as well, succeeding co-founder Larry Page.

Pichai has been instrumental in steering Alphabet’s push into artificial intelligence and has continued to ramp up capital spending on AI-related initiatives. The company spent $50 billion on such ventures last year.

"We are uniquely positioned to lead in the era of AI because of our differentiated full stack approach to AI innovation," Pichai said, as quoted by Fortune in a report last October. "And we are now seeing this operate at scale."