© Albert Gea / Reuters
The chief executive of Google Inc. has been given an astounding $199 million in shares, setting him on a path to be the highest-paid CEO of a publicly traded company in the U.S. Sundar Pichai was made chief executive after Alphabet, the search engine’s parent company, was created. The 43-year-old executive was given 273,328 Class C Alphabet shares this month, which will become available to him in quarterly increments through 2019 if he stays at his job. That amount is the largest ever given to a Google executive whose equity grants have to be reported, according to Bloomberg Business. Pichai led or oversaw product management of household-name projects like Google Chrome, Google Drive, Gmail, and Google Maps. Last week, Alphabet reportedly surpassed Apple as the world’s most valuable firm.