At 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.
If someone's actually willing to pay that for you, you should take the job. If no one is, then you are not even as good as Pat Gelsinger when he doesn't meet his objectives.
Details: $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.
Pichai 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.
Poor CEO my abs. When ChatGPT came out Microsoft was singing victory songs, and predicted Google's imminent death. 3 years later Google has one of the best models and Microsoft is still borrowing OpenAI's model. Not only that, Google is running their models on their own hardware, not Nvidia's.
One of the things that a CEO drives is vision and innovation.
Sundar misses the mark on these things. AI is a good example. Google invented the transformer architecture, but simply published it for its competitors to use. It took a code red in 2023 to finally push Google to develop products based on this.
Cloud. Years late to the game. All it would have taken is a letter similar to the famous Bezos memo to eventually get all of Google's world-class scaled infra pointing externally and generating revenue. Instead, Google Cloud started late, and couldn't reuse much of the internal infrastructure.
Stadia, another example. That architecture is probably the future. It's not clear how gamers in developing countries are going to afford thousands of dollars in hardware that sits idle 90% of the time.
> Google invented the transformer architecture, but simply published it for its competitors to use.
That's how innovation works in this industry. If companies didn't allow researchers to publish their work it would set us back decades. Researchers building on each other's work is how this industry was built.
> It took a code red in 2023 to finally push Google to develop products based on this.
So Google executed. Ability to execute is one of the things that makes a good CEO. Other CEOs have additional qualities such as vision, and getting others to believe in the vision. But not every CEO needs to be a Steve Jobs!
Plenty of innovations are coming out of Google, just look at Nano Banana Pro for example.
Google invented the basis of LLMs, but under Pai failed to come up with the idea of ChatGPT. Getting Gemini into a workable state required the return of Page and Brin. It seems to be working out for Google, but how they got here is a very big mark against Pichai's leadership.
1. Proprietary Data (Youtube, docs, gmail, cloud logs, waymo, website analytics, ads, search, the list is huge)
2. Commercial Datacenters (theyre ahead at least)
3. Chip production (Google is manufactoring proprietary chips)
4. Consumer OS (Chrome, Andriod)
5. Consumer Hardware (Pixel)
Basically google has access to data that OpenAI will never have access to, can lower costs below what OpenAI can, and is already a leader in all the places OpenAI will need massive capex to catch up.
You can't train LLMs on proprietary data, at least not if you want to make that LLM as accessible as Gemini. Otherwise random people can ask it your home address.
So it matters less than one would think. Also, ChatGPT can do 'internet search' as a tool already, so it already has access to say Google maps POI database of SMBs.
And ChatGPT also gets a lot of proprietary data of its own as well. People use it as a Google replacement.
What if the CEO isn't just telling the company how much to invest, but also has influence on how that money is used? Google's relative success, if it exists, I'd rather not judge, isn't from investing more than everybody else. Because the money just keeps pouring into these things, for all contenders.
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?
Not the person you're replying to, but something that has bothered me about him (and a lot of SV tech), is how they did rapid over-hiring in 2022, then a year later fire a bunch of people, while he claimed he took "full responsibility", but still got a nice happy bonus that year. I'm not sure I know what "taking full responsibility" actually means, because to me it seems like if you have to lay off thousands of people in a year, that would be a good reason to not get a bonus.
These are peoples' lives. People almost certainly quit decent jobs because there was a prestige factor in working for Google, potentially moved to the overpriced world of California, just to be fired less than a year later because apparently Pichai thought that interest rates would never increase and there would be free money for forever. These people have families, and they almost certainly thought that moving to Google would be a "stable" position, because it's one of the biggest SV companies.
I don't know if he's good for the stock price, that's tougher to gauge, but I do think he's a short-sighted jerk.
The "I take full responsibility" thing has been entirely meaningless.
I guess it's supposed to convey that it's not the laid-off folks' fault, and that it was "his decision", but as you said: "taking full responsibility" without any real impact to his life? I may as well take full responsibility for the layoffs. It'd mean just as much.
Yeah, that's the thing; if he's acknowledging that it was his decision to do this, then maybe he shouldn't be getting bonuses and maybe be fired? Why are the regular schmucks the ones being punished for his terrible decisions and not him?
Maybe it was the right decision at the time to lay them off? I think that's why he got the bonus, actually! I'm sure the layoff was difficult for him as well: he certainly lost a lot of goodwill with his workforce and I'm sure the internal politics were tricky for anyone involved.
No one is getting "punished" - there was no promise of ten years of employment from Google. Like when an employee leaves, you wouldn't say they're "punishing" the employer.
I 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.
Without taking a stance on whether their search has improved or degraded, we can observe that the same claim (“search is so degraded it’s unusable”) has been common for like 5 years at this point. If it’s really such a problem, why haven’t people already switched? Google’s search is at 90% market share [1]. Surely if it was perceived as a problem to customers there should be some measurable effect?
Google has succeeded in enshittifying their search in a way that the vast majority of users (not customers -- those are the advertisers) have not noticed.
If the users aren’t bothered by the “enshittification”, does that reflect poorly on the CEO? The CEO is supposed to make money, and maybe has personal aspirations to improve the world. They’re not making art.
Sundar 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).
It'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.
They missed the boat with ChatGPT, the research paper for it initially came from Google. There's no real focus between Android, ChromeOS, and Fuschia. The AI results box was possible a decade ago, but not giving money to the sites the info was gotten from was too far a stretch. How I feel is that the company doesn't really know what it's doing, there's no real leadership. KilledByGoogle is a website. With Stadia the technology was there but didn't have the right backing to make it in the market. Though it turns out those GPUs are useful for GCP for AI, so that might have been the real reason. He's just not much of a leader. He doesn't need to go full Elon, but some amount of character would be nice.
Pichai is being evaluated for his effect on stock price. His shareholders don't care if every product and service they offer has gotten worse for users in the meantime.
Gemini keeping pace with Claude and ChatGPT is clearly some kind of management victory, because Zuckerberg and Musk don't seem to be able to do it despite having limitless cash to spend.
Don't give Pichai credit for that. Google had the strongest ML research org on the planet before he took over, and it had Demis, arguably the best researcher in the field (and it had Geoffrey Hinton before that). The fact that goog was so far behind OAI despite Demis blazing frontiers was a major management failure.
Sundar's enshittification has also juiced short term share prices at the cost of long term health. It might turn out to be a decent decision for search because it's in the midst of being disrupted, but that's a happy accident for Sundar, not 4d chess (and you can argue the enshittification hastened the disruption).
Text search (without Gemini) and Gmail are much worse than they used to be. Android is less open, Chrome doesn't allow proper ad-blocking, YouTube has insane ads if you don't have Premium.
I think this refers less so on "Pichai did a great job" and more that Google is in a good position right now. One COULD say that Pichai is responsible for this - but probably many other semi-competent CEOs could have done about an equally solid job here. Google would have profited either way.
That may have been bad for users, but you can hardly claim it was bad for the company - not even in the long run. Ten years is like 40% of Google's lifetime, that is the long run! And if indeed he went all-in on AI in 2015, that seems to me like a damn near prophetic vision. Dislike AI by all means, but you can't say it's not the Current Big Thing or that Google is doing badly because of it. To see that coming so early as 2015 looks rather skilful to me.
I did not know this about Pichai and if true, it makes me feel rather better about his leadership.
> if indeed he went all-in on AI in 2015, that seems to me like a damn near prophetic vision.
Also note that 7 years later, when ChatGPT came out, built on top of Google Brain research (transformers), Google was caught flat-footed.
Even supposing that Pichai really had the right vision a decade ago, he completely failed in leading its execution until a serious threat to the company's core business model materialized.
I'm surprised people still think this. Google has the strongest position of any company in the world on AI. They have expertise and capability across the entire stack from chips to data centers to fundamental research to frontier models. Just because they weren't first-to-market with a chatbot doesn't mean they almost lost or made some terrible durable blunder.
That's about Google, though. The picture about Sundar specifically is harder to evaluate. The pessimistic take is that Google had that position already and Sundar failed to proactively lead through a fundamental product shift, forcing the company onto the defensive for some time. The optimistic take is that Sundar, having occupied the top spot since 2015, prioritized investments in the company's overall technology development, then successfully executed a rapid product pivot when the market changed, securing a dominant position in both research and product that nobody else can compete with long-term.
People give him way too many breaks, he's a money manager. He was asleep at the wheel when OpenAI absolutely steamrolled them, even though they very easily could have won that race.
Well 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.
Isn'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.
sure, 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.
> 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.
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 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?
> 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.
Google 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.
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.
Companies 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.
Can 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.
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.
I 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.
Private in that they're not owned by the taxpayers or government. Amtrak would be an example of a "public" company in the sense that I believe that the poster was describing.
These words have meaning already, and what they said makes no sense due to that. A public company has many obligations a private company doesn't, and more limitations on what it can do.
Sorry 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.
Well 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.
Adding 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.
Where 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.
1: Location saves time to do the stuff you want to be doing.
2: Space for activities, such as being able to host large parties, friends, family, etc..
3: Convenience and time saving from having a lot of things in-house: gym, pool, tennis courts, etc.
4: Security. When everyone knows who you are, they begin to make up excuses to get close to you and yours. Even if you don't want seclusion, you may be forced into it.
5: The people who you hang out with most have big mansions too - you want them to be just as comfortable visiting you as when you are when you visit them.
I used to ask myself the same question, but then I realized that for these people it doesn't matter how much they spend. When you are worth billions of dollars, the difference between spending $10M or $50M on your home Does Not Matter. You still have many other $M to spend on other things. It's perfectly rational for them to spend what seems like a large amount of money for an apparently small marginal improvement.
I don't know about Pichai in particular but whenever rich people do things that don't make sense the answer is usually tax avoidance or financial engineering.
If you have many shares concentrated in a particular company that you can't or don't want to sell for legal or tax reasons, you can borrow money to buy a house. As long as you service the interest you get a house without having to sell too many shares and trigger tax obligations.
Home loans are also nice because they are a form of leverage that is secured against an asset but is not subject to margin calls if the value of that asset falls.
I don't think so; I know a lot of them are in charge of multiple companies, which sounds like they work a lot, but I think it signals just as much that CEO really isn't that hard of a job.
Elon is the CEO of like four or five companies I think, while also ostensibly heading a government agency. If you can have four or five full time jobs, then they are not full time jobs.
Given that, I suspect that they're able to find plenty of time for themselves.
I have not heard anyone of the superrich who stays at home on the sofa; maybe there are some rich Influencers these days who are more "consumption heavy", but what I can judge is even these guys pump out stuff on a more or less professional level, meaning they cant do it as a hobby.
compare that behaviour with Warren Buffet or Charlie Munger. They wanted more money only to pursue their other interests. They succeeded in earning more money than imaginable.
have 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
Ah, 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.
Regular 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.
Isn’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).
How 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
> 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.
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.