Google boss becomes highest paid CEO in US

The Chief Executive Officer of Google, Sundar Pichai has been awarded $199 million shares making him the highest paid CEO in the US.

A regulatory filing revealed this on Tuesday.

Pichai became the search engine’s CEO following the creation of its parent company, Alphabet.

Pichai, 43 was awarded 273,328 Alphabet shares worth $199 million in February.

This increases his total stock value to approximately $650 million.

However, this is still below the fortunes made by Google’s founders, Larry page and Sergey Brin who have amassed fortunes of $34.6 billion and $33.9 billion, according to Forbes.

The figure is also less than that of Google’s former CEO, Eric Schmidt with a total share value of $3 billion.

Google CEO Pichai receives stock grant https://t.co/SH5vChOU7V

— Reuters Business (@ReutersBiz) February 9, 2016

Pichai joined the company in 2004, he was initially a leading product management staff on a number of Google’s client software products. He was largely responsible for Google drive.

He also took part in the development of Gmail and Google maps.

Alphabet’s Chief Financial Officer,Ruth Porat was also handed shares worth about $38 million.