Tech

Google boosted base pay for 4 top execs to $1 million and handed them up to $34 million in stock, weeks after employees raised concerns about pay and inflation

Ruth Porat
Google CFO Ruth Porat Google
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Four Google C-suite executives are set to get a salary bump to $1 million, plus a hefty increase in stock awards.

According to a summary of executive salaries disclosed in SEC filings, the four Google execs — chief financial officer Ruth Porat, senior VP Prabhakar Raghavan, chief business officer Philipp Schindler, and legal chief Kent Walker — will see their annual salaries bumped from $650,000. 

All are also eligible for a $2 million bonus if they help Google to meet its "social and environmental goals" for 2022.

The execs' total compensation packages are considerably chunkier when taking equity into account. As well as their increased annual pay, the executives were granted millions of dollars' worth of performance and restricted stock units, which variously vest at different times and depend on the execs sticking around.

According to the filing, Porat and Walker were each granted $23 million total in stock units, and Raghavan and Schindler $34 million total each.

As of December 2019, chief executive Sundar Pichai's annual base salary comes in at $2 million. He's eligible for a further $150 million in restricted and performance stock units if he stays at Google and meets certain performance targets.

Google's finances are in good health following another record quarter in October, raking in revenue of $65.1 billion and almost $20 billion in profit.   

The move comes weeks after a December all-hands meeting in which Frank Wagner, Google's compensation chief, addressed rank-and-file staff about salary adjustments. According to CNBC, Google employees had expressed concerns about rising inflation, and asked if compensation would be adjusted accordingly.

Wagner reportedly told staff the firm was paying people more in order to remain competitive, but that it would not be explicitly offering any "across-the-board" adjustment in line with inflation.

"As I mentioned previously in other meetings, when we see price inflation increasing, we also see increases in the cost of labor or market pay rate," Wagner was quoted by CNBC as saying. "Those have been higher than in the recent past and our compensation budgets have reflected that."

Insider approached Google for comment. 

This article and headline have been amended to clarify references to inflation.

Do you work at Google? Got a tip? Contact reporter Martin Coulter via email at mcoulter@insider.com, or via encrypted messaging app Signal at +447801985586.

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Martin Coulter was a technology reporter based in London.  He primarily covered Google, as well as Europe's buzziest tech startups, with a focus on artificial intelligence and cybersecurity.   Martin also reported on other parts of the technology industry including venture capital, disinformation, and regulation. He was also previously a technology reporter at the Financial Times.  DeepMind's cofounder was placed on leave after employees complained about bullying and humiliation for years. Then Google made him a VP. DeepMind's protein-folding breakthrough triggers fierce debate among skeptical scientists: 'Until they share their code, nobody in the field cares' An ex-Uber exec whose new freight startup is backed by Jeff Bezos and Eric Schmidt has been accused of fraud in a California lawsuit Inside Dominic Cummings' wild scheme to build a British Google via a no-deal Brexit: 'It's a bit of a simplistic way of thinking about technology'