Alphabet Senior Management Awarded Stock Options, Salary Rises

Working in Silicon Valley for leading tech firm such as Google parent Alphabet can be a very rewarding role.

Regulatory filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) have revealed that Alphabet executives are getting pay rises between $650,000 to $1 million, along with lucrative stock awards, CNBC has reported.

Last week it was revealed that Apple was paying a selected number of its engineers a huge bonus (between $50,000 and $180,000) in order to retain their services and stop their defection to Meta Platforms (Facebook) and others.

Pay rises, stock options

However the Alphabet reward for its senior management comes after its share price surged 65 percent in 2021, ahead of other big name tech firms.

By delivering these handsome returns for investors last year, Google’s top leaders are now getting a salary boost for 2022 along with hefty stock awards, CNBC reported.

Alphabet filing with the SEC revealed that its board has approved new compensation packages for finance chief Ruth Porat, legal head Kent Walker, search boss Prabhakar Raghavan and Philipp Schindler, the company’s chief business officer.

The executives’ base salaries will reportedly increase from $650,000 to $1 million, according to the filing. In addition, they each received stock awards valued at between $23 million and $35 million, split between performance-based equity and stock that vests over time.

The filing showed that Raghavan and Schindler received the biggest stock award packages for 2022.

The company granted each of them $12 million in performance-based stock that will vest between from 2022 to 2024, depending on how the share price performs compared to members of the S&P 100, CNBC reported.

They received an additional $23 million in restricted stock that will vest quarterly in 12 installments, subject to continued employment.

Porat and Walker each received $5 million in performance-based equity and $18 million in restricted stock.

Executive compensation

Executive compensation packages tend to be much more generous in the US compared to Europe and other parts of the world.

Eyebrows were raised in October 2019, when it was revealed that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella had received a 65 percent rise.

Nadella’s annual salary rose to $42.9 million, thanks to the strong performance of the software giant’s share price after it reached the trillion dollar valuation three years ago.

In early 2022 Microsoft is now worth $2.51 trillion, and this week Apple briefly surpassed the $3 trillion mark.