It’s a sign of where Google wants to go.

Alphabet has just tied Sundar Pichai as CEO of the company with one of the more generous salary bonuses of the technology sector. No less than 692 million dollars in the next three years. The figure, without a doubt, draws attention, but what is truly revealing is not the amount of the bonus itself, but rather what variables its collection is conditioned on.

Two of the most generous economic blocks depend directly on the value reached by Waymo, the autonomous taxisand Wing, its subsidiary delivery with drones. With this move, Alphabet has made clear in writing what its priorities are for the next three years.

A bonus that reveals a strategy. He official document presented before the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), details how Alphabet will incentivize Pichai to develop the company’s strategy through 2029. In this document, Alphabet’s board of directors assures that “further incentivizing Mr. Pichai is in the best interest of Alphabet and its shareholders, and is designed to maximize long-term value for shareholders.”

As usually happens in this type of bonuses for senior managers, Pichai’s compensation plan will materialize in the form of a series of share packages that are unlocked as the set objectives are achieved. The base salary of the CEO of Alphabet remains at two million dollars annually, a figure that has remained unchanged since 2020. In reality, he does not care too much since if it increases it will also your tax bill would increase. The important thing about the bonus is the bonus action packages, which are divided into three blocks.

• The first tranche, valued at $84 million in Alphabet shares, are the easiest to obtain since they are released month by month for three years and all Pichai has to do is remain in his position as CEO.
• The second block, worth $126 million (with two tranches of $63 million each), is linked to Alphabet’s stock market performance compared to the rest of the S&P 100 companies. This tranche can double if Google’s stock market value exceeds the board of directors’ estimates.
• Finally, the third block is that of the so-called Bet Performance Units: shares directly linked to the growth of Waymo and Wing, with a joint value of 175 million, but with the possibility of doubling their value to 350 million dollars if estimates are exceeded.

Waymo and Wing: what they are and why they matter. Waymo is the company Alphabet autonomous vehicleswhich was born as an internal Google project in 2009. Today it operates robotaxi services without a human driver in cities such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Houston, Dallas and San Antonio. In February 2026, it completed a financing round that valued it at $126 billion. In the package of shares that Alphabet has offered to Pichai, the party linked to Waymo has been assigned a block worth $130 million, which can reach up to $260 million if the company reaches double the proposed stock market target for the next three years.

Wing, for its part, is not as well-known as Waymo, and focuses its activity on delivering orders with drones. Its operation consists of delivering light packages directly to the customer’s home in a matter of minutes, covering what is called “last mile deliveries“. In January 2026 he announced the extension of your agreement with the Walmart supermarket chain to reach more than 270 stores by 2027, with a potential audience of more than 40 million Americans. In Pichai’s package, Wing is assigned a block worth 45 million dollars, expandable up to 90 million.​

Some go for robots, others for robotaxis. Linking a good part of that salary bonus of the company’s CEO to the success of two projects that until now had been considered minor, suggests that Google is already willing to take its AI one step further and that the next step is to give the definitive support to the models of Autonomous driving AI and air navigation.

With this movement, the Mountain View firm seeks to fully immerse itself in the race for robotaxis and autonomous delivery networks to stand up to Tesla, Uber or Amazonand place itself in a dominant position in a sector that promises to move billions of dollars in investments over the next decade.

A figure in perspective. If Pichai meets all the objectives by 2029, his salary bonus will be well above those of other large technology CEOs (with the exception of Elon Musk mega bonus at Tesla). Satya Nadella, head of Microsoft, collected 96.5 million dollars in fiscal year 2025, of which about 84 million came from shares; Tim Cook, at Apple, earned 74.3 million in the same period.

Pichai’s previous package, approved in December 2022, was $218 million and had a similar target-based structure to this one. Since Pichai took over as CEO in August 2015, Alphabet’s market capitalization has gone from $535 billion to $3.6 trillion, briefly touching $4 trillion in January 2026.

Forbes esteem that the head of Google’s parent company has a personal wealth of about $1.5 billion. a figure very far away of the 255.2 billion dollars that Larry Page has or the 235,500 of Sergei Brin.

In Xataka | We knew that the CEOs of large companies were very well paid. What we didn’t know was how much their salary had been raised.

Image | European UnionWaymo, Wing