Google CEO Salary

Unrelated, but I was researching executive salaries the other day. The CEO of the Norwegian Pension fund, which has $1.39 trillion in AUM, earns a $660k annual salary - no extra compensation as far as I could find. Alphabet has a £1.36 trillion market cap, with a $200m+ CEO comp.<p>Makes one wonder if you really need to pay CEOs astronomical comp packages to attract the &quot;best talent&quot;.

The &quot;failed decisions&quot; list is bizarre and does a terrible job supporting the argument.<p><pre><code> - Gmail Inbox - Directing company’s resources towards messaging apps. (Remember Allo, Duo. Exactly) - Virtual assistants - Now LLMs </code></pre> None of these were large bets, nor do they relate to the major cash cow that is search. Further, LLMs are in their verrrrrry early days. We don&#x27;t know how much impact they&#x27;ll have or how they&#x27;ll impact Google&#x27;s business, but not exploring them would be a truly insane choice for the CEO of Google.

I like that someone said this, but I really Grit my teeth when someone says &quot;learnings.&quot;<p>I have no problem with using preferred pronouns or saying &quot;chestfeeding&quot; instead of &quot;breastfeeding.&quot; I don&#x27;t understand it, but if it&#x27;s making you uncomfortable, I&#x27;m totally fine with changing <i>that</i> part of my vocabulary.<p>But &quot;ask&quot; and &quot;learn&quot; are verbs. You &quot;ask questions&quot; or &quot;make requests&quot; and you &quot;learn lessons.&quot; You do not &quot;have asks,&quot; you &quot;have questions.&quot; And you sure as daisies don&#x27;t &quot;learn learnings.&quot;<p>It&#x27;s sad that this is what I&#x27;m taking away from this discussion, but it&#x27;s Saturday night and I&#x27;m posting a comment on HN instead of dating a hot European super-model, so I&#x27;m sort of used to sad.

I honestly miss Inbox every time I open gmail.

What was the last big successful product Google released that’s still around?<p>I honestly don’t know. Search, Gmail, Maps, GCP, and Android is all before 2010.

I believe Sundar will be remembered as one of the weakest CEOs of his generation, and a person who caused actual harm to humankind by wasting one of the highest concentrations of talent (Google circa mid-2010s) that has ever existed. Imagine what these people could have achieved elsewhere if not lured by Google to be subjected to Sundar&#x27;s incompetence.

I recall digg.com, way back when. It basically collapsed one day. Gone. Documented on Reddit [0].<p>Sundar&#x27;s &quot;failures&quot; must be considered relative to the risk - he has the power to destroy Google completely in a matter of weeks with a bold and headstrong call. There are idiots out there who would do that for whatever reason (obvious threat in Silicon Valley - maybe the search results don&#x27;t promote enough Diversity, Equity and Inclusion when someone searches for &quot;buy an [thing]&quot;). Sundar being a known quantity who won&#x27;t do anything bold is quite possibly worth $200 million.<p>Bud Light has been in the headlines for the wrong reasons - it happens. Mobs of angry consumers get triggered for the weirdest things.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;OutOfTheLoop&#x2F;comments&#x2F;3bxdqu&#x2F;what_is_the_digg_exodus_and_how_was_the_community&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;OutOfTheLoop&#x2F;comments&#x2F;3bxdqu&#x2F;what_i...</a>

Google (and the dominant adtech mode of financing tech development) has long entered the cash cow period.<p>Discussing the minutiae of decision making and compensation of individuals who&#x27;s primary job is to keep that stale show running is not particularly interesting from the perspective of tech development and any positive impact on peoples lives. (BTW What is the last time Google surprised you positively?)<p>It may be interesting to discuss this though in the context of broader corporate governance and market structure &#x2F; competition and incentives. Is that extra × 100 factor in compensation that accrues only to oversized entities really necessary to incentivise individuals to work in private for-profit enterprize?<p>I give it to you that if you had 10 mini-Googles competing and 10 mini-Sundars receiving 1&#x2F;10 in compensation at least one of them would be worth the money.

I loved Inbox and was so disappointed when they killed it, honestly

Sundar is not coming up with all the product ideas. Nor is he vetting all the ideas. Ideas come up from product leaders under him. Surely he must have vetoed dozens of bad ideas every year. There is latent talent in these giants and experiments fail.<p>Could Sundar be more ruthless? Yes; Does this and other articles have valid criticisms? 100%;<p>These articles going after Zuck, Sundar, etc are needed. But we do not see the other side.

At least Google cloud was not a bad idea.

Why is tech thought to be so innocent&#x2F;benevolent? Blows my mind.

If everybody earned the same amount, money would be pointless. Therefore differentiation in income is related to the complexity of economy. Putting artificial caps in place is well... artificial.

None of these were bad ideas.<p>Sundar can&#x27;t execute because he doesn&#x27;t know how to do programming and doesn&#x27;t understand the details.<p>He would never pass an engineering interview at Google, or any other software company (especially not OpenAI).