Indian-origin middle-class family boy turns billionaire: Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai joins elite club; despite not being a founder

Alphabet Inc.’s strong earnings on Wednesday added to its explosive rally since early 2023, pushing its market value up by over $1 trillion and delivering a 120% return to investors.The surge has also made CEO Sundar Pichai a billionaire. His net worth is estimated at $1.1 billion by Bloomberg and $1.2 billion by Forbes’ real-time billionaires list.This is a rare achievement for a non-founder CEO in the tech world, where most billionaire executives owe their wealth to early equity stakes.Unlike tech leaders such as Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg or Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, who built their wealth through founding stakes, Pichai’s fortune comes entirely from his leadership role and compensation.Although Pichai wasn’t part of Google’s founding in 1998, he recently became its longest-serving CEO and will mark 10 years in the role this August.Alphabet reports strong financial performanceGoogle-parent Alphabet shares jumped 4.1% in early trading on Thursday in New York, the stock’s biggest intraday gain in two months.The rally followed its quarterly earnings report on Wednesday, which showed how the use of artificial intelligence has boosted efficiency across all areas of the business.The technology corporation achieved a second-quarter profit of $28.2 billion with revenue of $96.4 billion. Additionally, Alphabet announced plans to increase its capital expenditure by $10 billion beyond initial projections this year to accommodate rising cloud service demands.“We had a standout quarter, with robust growth across the company,” Pichai said. “AI is positively impacting every part of the business, driving strong momentum,” he added.“With this strong and growing demand for our cloud products and services, we are increasing our investment in capital expenditures in 2025 to approximately $85 billion and are excited by the opportunity ahead,” Pichai noted.Middle-class family boy turn billionaireSundar Pichai was born into a middle-class family in Tamil Nadu, India, and grew up in a modest two-room apartment.When Pichai received a scholarship to Stanford University in 1993, his family spent more than his father’s yearly salary, about $1,000 just to buy him a plane ticket to the US, Bloomberg reported.He joined Google in 2004 and steadily rose through the ranks, playing a key role in the development of the Chrome browser and later leading the Android division. In 2015, he was appointed CEO when Google restructured under its new parent company, Alphabet. He became CEO of Alphabet as well in 2019.