Key Points
- Sundar Pichai is the CEO of Alphabet Inc and its subsidiary Google.
- The company announced plans to cut 12,000 jobs around the world in January.
- Mr Pichai earned more than 800 times the median employee's pay in 2022.
Alphabet Inc chief executive earned about $A338 million in total compensation last year - more than 800 times the median employee's pay, a company securities filing shows.
Mr Pichai's compensation included stock awards of about $A326 million, the filing showed.
The pay disparity comes at a time when Alphabet, the parent company of Google, has been cutting jobs globally.
The Mountain View, California-based company announced plans to cut 12,000 jobs around the world in January, equivalent to six per cent of its global workforce.
Early this month, hundreds of Google employees staged a walkout at the company's London offices following a dispute over lay-offs.
In March, Google employees staged a walkout at the company's Zurich offices after more than 200 workers were laid off.
'Tech wreck'
Alphabet is just one of the tech giants to announce mass layoffs in the past year, in a trend that has been dubbed the 'tech wreck'.
After Elon Musk's Twitter takeover last year, the social media site is estimated to have laid off half of its workforce, equating to around 3,700 jobs lost.
Streaming giant Netflix cut 450 jobs in 2022, with two rounds of lay-offs in May and June, while at the end of August, Snapchat's parent company Snap let go of around 1,200 people - about 20 per cent of its employees. Meta - the owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp - slashed 11,000 jobs, or some 13 per cent of staff, in November.
This year, online retail giant Amazon announced in January that it would cut more than 18,000 jobs, while Microsoft also said another 10,000 employees would be made redundant, following two smaller rounds of layoffs.
