Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai has surpassed the $1 billion net worth threshold, making him a billionaire. With Alphabet’s shares approaching an all-time high, the 53-year-old from India has seen his fortune rise to $1.1 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

The main factor for this financial leap is the rise in Alphabet’s stock, which has increased by more than 120 percent since early 2023 and increased the company’s market capitalisation by more than $1 trillion, reported Bloomberg.

This is an exceptionally rare feat for a non-founding CEO, particularly in the tech sector. Other high-ranking executives like Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang owe their wealth to their founding equity stakes in their companies.

Earlier this month, Pichai also became the longest-serving chief executive of the company, completing nearly a decade at the helm.

Pichai’s humble background

Sundar Pichai was born into a middle-class family in Tamil Nadu and raised in a two-room apartment. The family didn’t have a car and only got its first telephone when he was 12. When Pichai won a scholarship to Stanford University in 1993, his family paid more than his father’s annual salary $1,000, for a plane ticket to California.

Pichai’s association with Google

Pichai joined Google, now Alphabet’s main subsidiary, in 2004. His early contributions to Chrome and Android laid the groundwork for his elevation to CEO in 2015. Pichai was named the Alphabet CEO in 2019.

“One of the first things I did as CEO was to pivot the company to be focused on AI,” Pichai told Bloomberg in an interview in October.

Google made its first significant investment in artificial intelligence in 2014. Pichai has been steadily increasing capital expenditures, spending about $50 billion last year alone on AI-specific initiatives including energy capacity, semiconductors and data center projects.