Google’s Sundar Pichai just became a billionaire—but could have been up an extra billion if he hadn’t sold stock

Pichai’s net worth has hit $1.1 billion, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index recorded, courtesy of significant cash reserves and the CEO’s 0.02% stake in the company with a market cap of more than $2.3 trillion.

Unlike many of his Mag7 peers, the Big Tech boss didn’t found the company which has afforded him a 10-figure fortune. Compared to contemporaries like Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, or Tesla co-founder Elon Musk, Pichai’s net worth is considerably lower given the fact he hasn’t held a significant sum of shares since the early days of the company.

Pichai’s path to billionaire status has also been altered by the fact that he has sold shares in Alphabet which were awarded to him as part of his compensation package.

For example, Pichai has sold a reported $650 million in Google-owner Alphabet’s stock over the past decade he has served as CEO—sales which could now have amounted to more than $1 billion in gains, winning him a net worth of some $2.5 billion per Bloomberg’s Index.

For example, in June Pichai offloaded some 33,000 class C Alphabet shares for a price of approximately $169 apiece, totaling some $5.5 million in sales.

But at the time of writing, those shares sit at a little over $193—which would have resulted in a value of more than $6.4 million.

Google declined to comment.

Advance planning

But the CEOs of the world’s largest companies are not playing the highs and lows of their company’s share prices the way retail investors or Wall Street analysts may be.

Many of Pichai’s recent sales have been pursuant to a Rule 10b5-1, which allows stock sales to be set up in advance by officers of publicly-listed companies to avoid any accusations of inside trading.

The rule has a number of stipulations, chief among them that a formula (not an person) determines the number, price, and date of the trade. A third party must also be employed to conduct the sales, who cannot be influenced by the client.

Pichai’s sales on July 16 and June 4 this year were both pursuant to 10b5-1, for example, as were sales made in previous years.

This tactic will be of no surprise to Wall Street watchers. Fortune reported last summer that Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang, for example, was offloading $14 million in stock on a near-daily basis, all pursuant to the same regulation.

At the time James Reda, who is managing director at Chicago-based consultancy Gallagher’s HR and compensation practice, said moves for such executives make absolute sense: “Ultimately, if you don’t sell the stock you’re gonna have to be like Elon Musk and some others that are putting stock up for collateral and getting these humongous loans.

“That just makes everybody more leveraged, why do that? Peel off a little stock on a regular basis and sell it.”

The AI billionaires

While Alphabet beat market expectations this week with its second quarter results, the majority of the rally behind the company at the moment comes from (no surprise) AI.

Pichai isn’t alone with thanking artificial intelligence for his good fortune. Last year the world’s richest, from Musk and Zuckerberg to Oracle’s Larry Ellison, added $585 billion to their fortunes largely thanks to the technology.

On the company’s earnings call Wednesday, the phrase “AI” was used some 90 times. Alphabet reported revenues up 14% year over year to $96.4 billion, confirming Google Search, YouTube ads, Google subscriptions, and Google Cloud all delivered double-digit growth in Q2.

A key concern for investors—particularly when looking at the market leaders in the AI race—will be whether companies can keep the talent to stay ahead of competitors. OpenAI, for example, has lost some of its staff to Meta’s newly-created AI unit.

Pichai shrugged off such fears, telling investors on the call: “We’ve gone through these moments before. We have obviously always deeply invested in talent, including in AI talent, for well over a decade now. I think we have an extraordinary both breadth and depth of the talent.”

“In my experience, the top people look for a combination of; they want to really be at the frontier driving progress, and so the mission and how state-of-the-art your work is matters, so that’s super important to them, access to compute resources, and access to your peers, working with the best people in the industry,” he added. “I think we are pretty competitive on all those fronts.”