Google CEO Sundar Pichai to cash in $380 million share award

It's about to rain money on Google CEO Sundar Pichai this week. According to a Bloomberg report, Pichai on Wednesday would be cash in an award of 353,939 restricted shares, which he received before a promotion in 2014 will vest.

The Bloomberg data further showed that at the end of last week, the grant was worth about $380 million, making it one of the biggest single payouts to a public firm official lately.

Sundar Pichai in 2015 had received the shares prior to his promotion to senior vice president of products a year earlier, when he took over many of co-founder Larry Page’s responsibilities.

However, it is also to be noted that the firm has not disclose Sundar Pichai's compensation for 2017.

Meanwhile, Google's parent company Alphabet has detailed how it makes decisions regarding its dozen different businesses, with India-born Sundar Pichai wielding a lot of power over the search giant, a media report has said. According to documents to the US Security and Exchange Commission (SEC), since Google blew up its corporate structure to form Alphabet in late 2015, it now separates its financials between Google and its "Other Bets".

Other Bets currently include 11 different companies, like self-driving car unit Waymo and healthcare arm Verily, CNBC reported. Late last year, the SEC asked Alphabet for specific details around how much decision-making power Alphabet CEO Larry Page has on individual Google businesses, and the different kinds of information given to Page versus president Sergey Brin and Google CEO Pichai, among other things.

Alphabet CEO Page receives regular financial information about every Alphabet company but doesn't allocate resources to individual product areas within Google or within individual Other Bets. That hands-off relations played out dramatically in the case of Nest, the company Google acquired for USD 3.2 billion in 2014. When Nest spun-out as an Alphabet unit, the two companies had no incentive to work together and ended up building similar products. Ultimately, Alphabet decided to roll Nest back into Google earlier this month.

Pichai, 45, also does not have authority over Alphabet's overall resource allocation to Google. He has no authority over parent company's "Other Bets" nor has any decision-making power over them despite the search giant counted for all of Alphabet's profit and more than 98 per cent of its revenue in its last quarter. But Pichai has a lot of power over Google, the report said. He receives weekly and quarterly reports which include individual financial information for Google product areas, including YouTube, advertising, and hardware, and include operating results, capital expenditures, and headcount for Google as a whole.