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Google just gave Sundar Pichai a $692M pay package
- varispeed 7mo agoRegular IT workers should be grateful they earn substantially more than a teacher or a nurse /s. The fact that labour cost is disconnected from the value it generates is probably one of the greatest scams pulled on working class. 99% of his pay packet should be redistributed among workers.
- nickff 7mo agoIsn’t Google just distributing varying proportions of a pseudo-monopoly rent? It doesn’t seem like the CEO is really contributing that much to the company, but most of the individual contributors seem to be compensated disproportionately relative to their quality of work (as well).
- pjmlp 7mo agoDepends on the country, in some we're just plain office workers like everyone else.
- ambicapter 7mo ago> The fact that labour cost is disconnected from the value it generates It's not disconnected from its value in the market, I don't think. I think the great scam is telling people that capitalist values are in any way attached to human values.
- s1artibartfast 7mo agoThe problem is it's quite a bit more challenging to agree on prices for exchange denominated in human values. There is no common currency.
- ambicapter 7mo agoWe don't have to do it, I'm not arguing that market pricing should be changed. I just want people to stop pretending they're related.
- s1artibartfast 7mo agoIsn't Sundar a worker? We are talking about his pay from negotiation with capital owners
- chihuahua 7mo agoHe's probably muttering "I have nothing to lose but my chains" as he's hand-washing his Che Guevara shirt.
- JCharante 7mo agoto be fair it's possible Sundar is unhappy and just wants to enjoy his wealth but it's hard to say no to $200m/yr
- bluefirebrand 7mo ago> Isn't Sundar a worker Executives are not workers, no
- daedrdev 7mo agoHow will shortages be avoided if pay isn’t deterred by supply and demand? An industry that needs workers raises wages until satisfied, what magical thinking do you propose instead
- mcntsh 7mo agoEvery cost is disconnected from the value it generates. Do you pay the price for gasoline, electricity, or food based on the value it provides you?
- petcat 7mo agoIsn't Google a trillion dollar company going gangbusters toward its next trillion dollars?
- gotwaz 7mo agoWell currently they make about 1500 bucks a year of every american household just selling ads. Make much less on the rest of the world. So it really just boils down to what the upper limit on ad sales to the american consumer is.
- compiler-guy 7mo agoThe cloud business is also doing quite well. Waymo is generating revenue now as well. So not just ads.
- raw_anon_1111 7mo agoIs it profitable?
- compiler-guy 7mo agoCloud is profitable. Waymo not, but is building. In any event, the grandparent was talking about revenue.
- raw_anon_1111 7mo agoWhich is completely meaningless. Anyone can sell a bunch of one dollar bills for 50 cents
- compiler-guy 7mo agoThat was the proper takeaway during Amazon.com’s preprofit stages.
- crop_rotation 7mo agoPichai has been a very poor CEO but Google's position was so strong that it is still doing fine. I am sure he is in the founder's good graces so as long as the company's stock takes a big dive he is gonna stay at the helm and keep raking in the big bucks.
- pinkmuffinere 7mo ago> Pichai has been a very poor CEO Why do you say this? I’m not familiar with him, and really haven’t paid much attention to Google’s strategy beyond cultural awareness, but I think Google has done well with staying competitive in AI, is dominating the self driving battle with Waymo, and has mostly kept its good brand intact (no small feat when you are so big). Are there some big mis-steps I don’t know about?
- rybosworld 7mo agoSundar was at the helm when the decision to worsen search results for the sake of ad revenue was made. Previously, the two concerns were "firewalled" so as to prevent the money-generating side of the company from eroding the user experience. This is a theme that's been at the core of every Titan of Industry's decline. That is: chasing of short-term results with disregard for the long term consequences. Alphabet is just so big and dominate in search that it will likely take quite a long time for the negative effects to appear. And they have other large businesses that haven't been as aggressively enshitified (Youtube, GCP). See Intel, Boeing, GE etc.
- gtowey 7mo agoIt's like when the Titanic struck the iceberg and the crew mostly thought the ship would be fine. Just because they're still making money doesn't mean the company hasn't already been damaged beyond repair. But in this case by the time it's clear the damage is fatal, those at the helm have jumped ship with piles of cash.
- turzmo 7mo agoI would argue that Google has had declining quality in search results, bordering on completely unusable in the past few years, and that has resulted in people using LLMs for things that they would have searched for years ago. Although they are competitive in AI, I think it is surprising that their product continues to frustrate people and that they are a distant second place.
- spwa4 7mo agoSo what's the reason? Another massive layoff coming up for Google?
- pajamasam 7mo ago> most of it is tied to performance, including new stock incentives linked to Waymo and its drone delivery venture Wing
- brcmthrowaway 7mo agoIs this the highest paid CEO anywhere (bar Elon)?
- laborcontract 7mo agoCan we please, please move past this generation of bean-counter CEOs. Google and Apple have done great things under Pichai and Cook, and yet I couldn't been less excited for what either is doing. Bring back experimental culture.
- smt88 7mo agoGemini, Waymo, and Wing are very experimental
- darepublic 7mo agoLook to smaller more focused companies for that
- fidotron 7mo agoSay what you will about Zuckerberg, but at least he tried to burn untold billions on something that was potentially slightly exciting. We should be grateful for funding of the research, and that it didn't pay off in market results. More of this!
- laborcontract 7mo agoBig time agree. I don't like the person, but i have great respect for his fearless capex spending.
- giwook 7mo agoI agree with the sentiment. Experimental culture is inherently risky though, and risk is not something you want too much of as a public company as your shareholders can and will be very loud. They do still experiment but in their R&D divisions so as to shield their cash cows from risk as well as to be able to better conceal how much money they’re pouring into moonshots so as not to spook investors. Waymo is the most recent moonshot I can remember going out of Google X, and they’re arguably a leader in the space. There are other projects in the works, and many more failed ones.
- geetee 7mo ago[flagged]
- krackers 7mo agoWhere else would they park their wealth? Stock market is all imaginary money. Maybe gold/silver. But housing works as an easy way to park wealth in a tangible way that's guarded against inflation. This fact is probably also why housing prices keep going up.
- 1970-01-01 7mo agoFunny how it's never crypto. They always choose non-technical investments for their own wealth.
- compiler-guy 7mo agoThese ultra wealthy folks don’t need highly volatile investments like crypto. They are mostly seeking to reduce volatility rather than hit home runs.
- mikert89 7mo agohave you ever been in one of these mansions? my hot take is people seriously underestimate how great being rich is, and how enjoyable some ocean side mansions are
- mlsu 7mo agoAh, that's why the lifetime earnings for a big tech CEO is about 50-100mm. It's enough to afford one of these mansions and a few additional properties around the world -- about as much wealth as any individual human being needs or could possibly spend in one lifetime. Right?
- delusional 7mo agoYou don't get to enjoy your single family home because you're at work all the time. The ultra-rich don't have that problem.
- jcheng 7mo agoDetails: $2MM/year in salary, the rest in performance based incentives. The $692MM figure is based on hitting all of the maximums (200% of a few different targets) and is the total for three years.
- Someone1234 7mo ago[flagged]
- lingrush4 7mo ago[dead]
- ChadNauseam 7mo agoI don't think this would be considered capital gains if it's being paid to him. You typically pay income taxes on your income, if it's in the form of money given to you by your employer.
- andsoitis 7mo ago> then up to $230M/year is "lower tax rate than his secretary" income? Why do you think that?
- Someone1234 7mo agoThe IRS thinks that too. Stock grants, assuming they're EVER taxed (which isn't a given), are taxed at a lower rate than income. But as I indicated, most are never vested in the traditional sense, and are even lower than standard capital gains.
- ahmedtd 7mo agoStock grants (RSUs, like Google gives out) are taxed as ordinary income at the moment they vest. If you sell them immediately, then you don't pay any additional capital gains tax, because there were no capital gains from the moment you got them to the moment you sold them. If you hold on to them, you will eventually pay capital gains on any increase in value from the moment they vested until the moment you sell them. Perhaps, once they are vested, you could take loans against them, to get some cash while avoiding selling them. But no matter what, they are taxed at the moment you receive them, and again at the moment they leave your possession.
- shevy-java 7mo agoEvil pays well. We need to find alternatives to Google - that giant is out of control now.
- throwaway613746 7mo ago[dead]
- tombert 7mo agoKagi is pretty decent, though I think they proxy to Google's index for at least some of their results.
- Imustaskforhelp 7mo agoAdding on to it, They use SerpAPI which (sort of) scrapes google and then they do their work on top and this is also how they allow your customizability features to be added too in search if i remember correctly. Kagi is great if you need great customizability and filters and if you wish to support the future of Kagi/products like these. And Duckduckgo is great if you need a Google alternative which "just works" without costing money* if you are frugal. Either way, both options are good and its best to leave Google if/when possible. The best feature of both of these and brave-search to some degree is that all three support bangs. !yt leads to youtube and !hn leads to hn.algolia.com :) and !sr and so so many more. Bangs might be the best feature that google users might be missing. It just saves so much time.
- Imustaskforhelp 7mo agoWell here are 8 search engines that I know that I did something recently with[0] 1. DDG (Duckduckgo) 2. Kagi 3. Brave (Independent) 4. Ecosia (Looking to be independent with Qwant in future) 5. Startpage 6. Marginalia (Independent and creator is on HN) 7. Mojeek (Independent) 8. Yandex.ru (Russian, Independent) I personally use DDG (Duckduckgo). I think its a decent option fwiw, yes I know it uses Bing internally but it works really great. > Evil pays well. It isn't that Evil pays well although one can say that but rather that, Short term profits seem to pay well. Although Google now has a decent AI model, Their search engine which I don't use aside from some image search sometimes, is getting worse, (maybe because that somehow helps them short term) because fwiw, their stock price isn't really correlated anymore with how good their search is, because you can bet that if that was the case, Google would throw everything to become best search engine. These corporations are so locked in/monopolistic that unless you change your search engine/(In case of Microsoft operating system), they don't really care about how much worse their product becomes and sometimes even if people stop using their product, short term, they still don't care. [0]: what I did: https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=47232986 https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=47232986
- kkfx 7mo agoI honestly have NOTHING against that: they are a private company, their money, their choice. I have plenty of other bones to pick with them, regarding the harvesting of personal data from smart devices and cloud services, how it's used, and so on, but the salaries of their executives are their own money, so it's their business and I don't see any reason for controversy. In fact, if they happen to lose talents because of their policies or ruin themselves over certain massive salaries, that's their problem, all the better. Unfortunately, most people seem incapable of attacking what actually needs to be attacked, instead of getting hung up on things that are perfectly legitimate.
- khazhoux 7mo ago> they are a private company They are a public company
- kkfx 7mo agoSorry I'm European, I mean "private" in the sense "not a Public Body", they are a company whose board has approved the remuneration using the company's own funds, meaning that the majority of shareholders are happy with this pay package.
- vasco 7mo agoThey are a public company.
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- BeetleB 7mo agoAt least the article mentions that it is contingent on bonus targets. All too often articles skip that and say "Y was paid $$$". Notably, go look at Intel's Pat Gelsinger. Prior to his firing, lots of articles talking about how he was one of the highest paid CEOs (citing numbers in excess of $150M). They'd fail to mention that it was over several years and only if he met targets. Well, he didn't meet those targets. His actual compensation was about $10M/year.
- mitthrowaway2 7mo ago[flagged]
- bombcar 7mo agoI'm willing to fail as Intel's CEO for the low, low cost of $5m/year, and I can get it done in a year.
- computomatic 7mo agoSorry, we’re only considering applicants with a proven track record of failing as CEO
- danillonunes 7mo agoCan't risk hiring an amateur and he accidently succeeded.
- fuzztester 7mo agoI've heard it's called falling, er, failing upwards.
- ryandrake 7mo agoI'll do it for $1m/year. Come on, shareholders, you could save a fortune.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
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- amelius 7mo agoThere's a strong smell coming out of that wealth gap now.
- delichon 7mo agoMore than an order of magnitude smaller than Tesla's deal with their CEO.
- Tempest1981 7mo ago3 orders of magnitude, right? 1e9 vs 1e12
- y0ssar1an 7mo agoabsolutely no one is smart or productive enough to justify $692m in pay. they could hire thousands of engineers for that money.
- jstummbillig 7mo agoThe market disagrees.
- gdilla 7mo agoya i could hire 500 min wage baseball players to replace ohtani then.
- haunter 7mo agoIsn't that the plot of Moneyball? You'll almost never find a single player with 30 stolen bases and 30 HR both, but you can find two players with 30 stolen bases and 30 HR alone for cheaper.
- gdilla 7mo agosure, and it doesn't work when everyone knows how to value stats that contribute to wins. Back then, they didn't do so equally. you could go bargain hunting and come out on top.
- periodjet 7mo agoThat’s not for you to decide. It’s for the people with the $692m to decide.
- tasuki 7mo ago> absolutely no one is smart or productive enough to justify $692m in pay. Upper management isn't paid based on how smart or productive they are. Google has like 400 billion yearly revenue. A CEOs decisions have enormous consequences, if a CEO can make slightly better decisions than another, it'd be easy to justify $692m in pay. That said, I don't believe Sundar Pichai is a great CEO. He's might be an ok bean-counter, not sure, but I'm pretty sure one can get cheaper bean-counters. > they could hire thousands of engineers for that money. Yes and pray what would they do with them?
- semiinfinitely 7mo agoworth it
- option 7mo agoGoogle should fire Sundar and make Denis CEO
- nojvek 7mo agoIt's Demis, not Denis. I don't think Demis wants to be CEO of all of Google. He wants to focus on DeepMind and AI. He has a life goal of inventing AGI and using that to solve the world's biggest problems. Leading Google gets him further not closer. He doesn't give a shit about ads and ads is Google's biggest money maker.
- SilverElfin 7mo agoGoogle has substantially caught up on AI and between their existing monopolies, capital, access to data, and ability to sell to existing cloud or Google apps customers, they’re going to become richer and more powerful than ever. This type of concentration makes it so that there’s no working competition element to the economy. Mega corps should be broken up and also charged absurdly high tax rates to fix this.
- fancyfredbot 7mo agoIs this what motivates Sundar Pichai to work harder for Google? More money? Surely there's nothing he could want that he doesn't already have. I understand it's insulting to be paid less than other CEOs, and I get that it's a way of keeping score. All the same I think he's doing it for the power, the respect, the fame. Would he have walked away if the number was only $100m? Would that have been rational?
- jstummbillig 7mo ago> Is this what motivates Sundar Pichai to work harder for Google? More money? Surely there's nothing he could want that he doesn't already have. I think the confusion stems from mapping normal people money usage on people, that have much more money than they can use on themselves: They don't do that. You can use excess money to make things happen as you see fit. Money enables you to do things in the world, and if you want to do things in the world, a few hundred million are very easily spent. I am sure most people around here would have no trouble allocating that amount of money towards something they would like to see happen or improved, and that's how a lot of money, that someone does not feel they need, is used.
- eboy 7mo ago[dead]
- tsoukase 7mo agoCompanies structure is much more monarchic than almost all regimes in history. CEOs stand in the top position like Gods, having full power at will, and then all the others follow as his workers. He can easily earn multiple times more than the next highest in the company because his responsibility is elevated. So, the company can afford to pay huge sum to one person because he is the only one that is able to bring in multiples of this (eg fire people, increase the stock price, prepare for a sale off). Companies are not democracies, not even monarchies, they are machines with a single brain for strategy: the CEO's.
- returnInfinity 7mo agoSergey said that Google was able to rapidly respond to ChatGPT because Sundar had already invested a lot into AI. They have the people, the models and the chips. And Sundar helped achieve that. That's what he said on some podcast.
- yablak 7mo agoI forgot how to count that low...