According to The Wall Street Journal report, 17 Indian-origin CEOs made into the top 500 rankings.
The CEO of Palo Alto Networks Nikesh Arora, an Indian-born secured the second highest paid CEO in the USA as per recent The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) report. In this article, we will discuss about corporate king Nikesh Arora and other Indians in the list.
Nikesh Arora completed his basic education from Delhi's Air Force Public School. After completion of B.Tech in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Varanasi, Arora went to Northeastern University for MBA in marketing. Further he completed MS in finance from Boston College. He also received an honorary PhD degree from Northeastern University.
In his diverse corporate career, Nikesh Arora held the position of CMO in T-Mobile during 2000-2004. He worked as a CBO in Google during 2004-2014. Arora became the highest paid executive at Google with a $51 million package in 2012. By the end of his time in Google, Nikesh Arora had collected stock awards worth around $200 million. Then, he served as a president and COO in Softbank during 2014-2016. During this time, he set a new record in Japan with a huge first-year compensation package of $135 million.
In 2018, he joined Palo Alto Networks as chairman CEO. “People at the company saw him as the successor to legendary investor Masayoshi Son,” according to a Bloomberg report.
Currently Nikesh Arora receives a hefty compensation of $151.43 million. Nikesh Arora’s compensation is much higher than other high-profile tech executives including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg ($24.40 million) and Google CEO Sundar Pichai ($8.8 million).
In a statement on Arora's compensation package, Palo Alto Network said last year: “Because of this significant vested ownership and the amount that Mr. Arora was projected to vest in over the next several years, the Board determined that a meaningful equity award would be necessary to ensure that such award retains and engages Mr. Arora.”
“Other tech giants like Tesla's Elon Musk and Alphabet's Sundar Pichai also opted for non-traditional compensation structures in 2023. Meanwhile, Elon Musk has not received compensation, Sundar Pichai Pichai earned $8.80 million and Mark Zuckerberg of Meta took home $24.40 million,” The Wall Street Journal reported.
Shantanu Narayen, the CEO of Adobe is ranked at 11 with a compensation of $44.93 million.
Micron Technology’s Sanjay Malhotra ($25.28 million), Ajei Gopal ($24.63 million) of Ansys, and Vertex Pharmaceuticals CEO Reshma Kewalramani ($20.59 million) also ranked within the top 120 as per the WSJ list.
The report also mentioned the achievements of IBM CEO Arvind Krishna ($20.40 million), Enphase Energy CEO Badrinarayanan Kothandaraman ($19.53 million), and Linde CEO Sanjiv Lamba ($19.20 million).
Some of the other names with Indian origin are:
Emerson electric CEO Surendralal Karsanbhai ($18.32 million), Cadence Design Systems CEO Anirudh Devgun ($17.34 million), Wellflower CEO Shankha Mitra ($17.20 million), Realty Income CEO Sumit Roy ($13.13 million), Keysight Technologies CEO Satish Dhanasekaran ($10.75 million), Rewity CEO Prahlad Singh ($9.13 million), Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai ($8.80 million), Waters CEO Udit Batra ($8.74 million), and Nordson CEO Sundarrajan Nagarajan ($6.98 million).
Hock Tan, the CEO of Broadcom topped the list with a salary of $162 million.
