Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai Made 1,085 Times As Much As Average Company Employee Last Year

Sundar Pichai, the chief executive officer of Google parent Alphabet (GOOG), received a compensation package worth $280.6 million --including stock awards -- last year, making him the highest-paid CEO in the information technology sector.

According to S&P Global Market Intelligence, Pichai’s take home pay was 1,085 times greater than the median salary of the average Google employee. (Some Google employees may also have received stock options as well)

Pichai also collected over four times the compensation of the next-highest paid information technology CEO, Robert Swan of Intel (INTC), who received $66.9 million.

“Pichai's stratospheric take was largely due to stock grants assigned when he was promoted from CEO of Google to CEO of corporate parent Alphabet,” S&P stated.

Pichai's annual salary was fixed at $2 million, but he also received hundreds of millions of dollars through a performance-based equity package.

The median pay for an Alphabet employee was $258,708 last year – but that figure was well above the median employee pay of $117,822 for the 20 largest U.S. publicly traded information technology companies.

Swan of Intel also benefited from stock grants, with equity awards of $61.7 million.

The average Intel employee earned $96,300 last year, meaning Swan’s compensation was about 208 times greater.

Among the technology sector, the CEO of Broadcom Inc. (AVGO), Hock Tan, received the lowest pay -- $354,119, which was only 7 times the salary of the average employee at that company.

However, when taking into account a 2017 long-term multiyear equity award that was not included in Tan's 2019 pay calculation and an equity benefit awarded to employees at Broadcom, Tan actually collected $26.9 million, or about 160 times the pay of the average Broadcom employee.

Old horse International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) had one of the lowest median employee pay packages, at just $56,896. But that meant that the company’s CEO in 2019 Virginia Rometty receive compensation that was 354 times greater.

Among other prominent tech CEOs, Tim Cook of Apple (AAPL) received more than $125 million in total compensation last year, mostly from the vesting of $113.5 million worth of Apple shares.