There is a lot of unrest in the high-tech industry in Silicon Valley right now, because the business of many well-known and large companies is no longer going as it used to. The result: Jobs are being cut, the list is long, be it Alphabet, Google’s parent company, the Facebook company Meta, the online retailer Amazon or many others.
Alphabet, for example, is cutting 12,000 jobs, about 6 percent of its global workforce, and employees have protested. There are also a number of measures to bring costs down. The US news channel CNBC reports also that Google is stopping the construction of its new campus in Silicon Valley for cost reasons, the preparatory work is on hold. Half a billion dollars is said to be saved worldwide just by reducing office space.
The boss gets 800 times than the average employee
CEO Sundar Pichai, 50, doesn’t notice anything. His salary has reached an astronomical level for 2022. He received a total of $226 million in compensation last year, the company said in a statement to the Securities and Exchange Commission. As a result, $218 million of the compensation consisted of stock awards resulting in part from prior years. The average compensation for an Alphabet employee for 2022 is still $279,802. Pichai gets around 800 times that amount. According to the information, the costs for the personal security of the CEO in 2022 were at least $ 5.94 million.
Pichai has been working for Google, the world’s largest search engine, since 2004. Among other things, he developed Google Chrome. When the company was restructured and Alphabet Holding was created, Pichai was appointed to head Google. In 2019, the two Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page announced that they would withdraw from the entire operational business. Pichai took over the helm of Alphabet in addition to his job at the helm of Google. Pichai’s net worth is estimated at more than $1 billion. In 2022, Alphabet had sales of around $260 billion and profits of around $60 billion.