[opportune]

Pay is not about how hard any job is. My job is not nearly as hard as many people who make much less than me. It’s about the supply and demand of the role and how much value someone in the role can generate (which you can think of as an upper bound on pay). When you’re making decisions for >100k people earning >$100B/year it’s easy to argue that the person trusted with that much responsibility provides that much value.

I personally don’t think Sundar is an amazing CEO. He is very conservative and boring. But at the same time Google has tended to be too reckless and fund many projects with speculative ROI, or with no cohesive strategy. Google is making the shift to selling to enterprise and government where a level-headed conservative CEO inspires a lot more confidence than an ambitious reckless one. Also, they have one of the greatest businesses ever to exist (search ads) which, compared to any other >$100bb business, is a lot more precarious: it’s not contingent on long term enterprise contracts or lock-in or a physical moat (supply chain, brick and mortar presence).

His job is to keep the golden goose laying eggs and to make sure Google succeeds the transition to enterprise software. Believe it or not he’s more qualified for the job than all the other SVPs at Google and because he’s well connected with the founders he’s not a wildcard like an outsider would be.