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List of highest-paid Indian origin CEOs:Welltower’s Shankh Mitra’s salary 77 times more than Google’s Pichai
3 hours ago
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Global companies pay a hefty sum of money to their top bosses. And the striking thing is that many of these highly paid CEOs and MDs are of Indian origin. Recently, a big piece of news surprised the business world. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella earned almost nine times more money than Google CEO Sundar Pichai in a single year. Nadella made a record-breaking $96.5 million or ₹907 crore. At the same time, Pichai made $10.73 million or ₹100 crore
Albeit, Sundar Pichai’s salary looks smaller because of how Google pays him. Google gives him a massive stock grant once every three years. For example, he made $226 million in 2022. In the years in between, his pay looks lower because he only gets his base salary and security costs. However, Google recently set up a new plan that can give him up to $692 million over the next three years
Why corporates offer such huge amounts of money to Indian-origin CEOs?
Following are the reasons why global companies pay their CEOs crores of rupees:
Pay is Linked to Stocks: CEOs do not get most of their money in cash. They get it in company shares or stocks. If the company does well, the stock price goes up, and the CEO becomes very rich. Satya Nadella received a lot of money because Microsoft became a world leader in Artificial Intelligence (AI)
The War for Talent: There are very few people who can run a giant company with thousands of workers. Big companies compete with each other to hire the best minds. They are ready to pay a high price to keep a great leader
Great Leadership Skills: Indian-origin CEOs are famous for two things: being humble and having strong willpower. They know how to handle stress, work well with different types of people, and help companies grow even during hard times
Source: Annual reports of respective companies
Note: The figures are converted into Indian rupees at $1=₹94 exchange rate
Success stories behind ascension to the top
It takes many years of hard work and dedication to become the boss of a global company. Here are the short stories behind the ascension of a few of the Indian-origin leaders to the top:
Satya Nadella was born in Hyderabad, India. He loved computers and moved to the United States to study. He joined Microsoft in 1992 as a young engineer. He worked there for more than 20 years in different departments. In 2014, he became the third CEO of Microsoft. He took a big risk and shifted Microsoft’s focus to cloud computing and Artificial Intelligence. His ideas worked perfectly, and Microsoft is now one of the most valuable companies in the world
2. Sundar Pichai (Google)
Sundar Pichai was born in Chennai, India. He studied engineering at the famous IIT Kharagpur. He later went to the US for higher studies. Pichai joined Google in 2004. He became famous because he led the team that made the Google Chrome web browser. He also managed popular products like Google Drive and Android. The founders of Google trusted him completely. He became the CEO of Google in 2015 and the CEO of the parent company, Alphabet, in 2019
3. Shankh Mitra (Welltower)
Shankh Mitra comes from Kolkata, India. He finished his engineering degree at Jadavpur University. After that, he went to Columbia Business School in the US to study business. He started his career at a company called PwC. Later, he worked as a financial analyst at top investment firms like Fidelity and Citadel. He joined Welltower, a massive real estate company that builds senior housing and hospitals, in 2016. Because of his excellent skills in managing money, he was made the CEO in 2020. Today, he is one of the highest-paid executives on earth.
Source: Annual reports of respective companies
Note: The figures are converted into Indian rupees at $1=₹94 exchange rate
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