Sundar Pichai joins billionaire club: All about his education, family & and net worth

Time of India

6 days ago

Sundar Pichai, the soft-spoken, Chennai-born executive at the helm of Alphabet, has quietly entered the ranks of billionaires. His fortune, now pegged at $1.1 billion by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, comes not from flash or flamboyance but from a steady climb powered by rising Alphabet shares and a low-key leadership style.
A rare feat for any non-founder tech CEO, but Pichai's journey was never typical to begin with.
Early life and education
Born on June 10, 1972, in what was then Madras, India, Sundar Pichai grew up in a two-room apartment. The living room doubled as a bedroom, where he and his brother would sleep each night. His father, Regunatha Pichai, worked as an electrical engineer at British firm GEC. His mother, Lakshmi, was a stenographer. Money was tight, but the vision was clear.
'My mom and dad did what a lot of parents did at that time… they sacrificed a lot to make sure their children were educated,' Pichai once said.
Source: X
After schooling at Jawahar Vidyalaya and Vana Vani in Chennai, he earned a degree in metallurgy at IIT Kharagpur, graduating with a silver medal. That opened the door to Stanford, where he pursued a master's in engineering and materials science. By 1995, he had relocated to the U.S.
for good, first working briefly at Applied Materials, before heading to Wharton for an MBA.
Family and personal life
It was at IIT Kharagpur that Sundar met Anjali. She was also studying chemical engineering, a quiet, driven young woman from Rajasthan whose father, Olaram Haryani, served in the government. Friendship turned to love, though like many IIT romances, the early years weren't always smooth.
Today, the couple lives far from the glare of headlines.
They have two children, Kavya and Kiran, whom they raise with deliberate privacy. While Sundar became a household name in tech, Anjali built a solid career of her own, beginning at Accenture and later moving into business operations at Intuit, a major software firm.
In a 2018 interview, Pichai offered glimpses into how his family handles the very technology that made him a global figure.
'When I come home on a Friday evening, I really do want to let go of my devices for a couple days.
I haven't quite succeeded in doing that,' he admitted during an interview.
'At home, our television is not easily accessible, so that there is 'activation energy' before you can easily go watch TV. I'm genuinely conflicted, because I see what my kids learn from all this. My son is 11 years old, and he is mining Ethereum and earning money. He's getting some insight into how the world works, how commerce works.'
Net worth
Alphabet, the parent company of Google, has seen its value soar.
Since early 2023, its stock has delivered roughly 120 percent returns. That surge added over $1 trillion in market cap, and catapulted Pichai's net worth to 10 figures.
Though his direct stake in Alphabet is just 0.02 percent, that sliver alone is valued at around $440 million. The rest of his wealth is largely in cash, amassed through years of compensation, bonuses, and stock awards.
In August, he quietly marked 10 years as Google's CEO. The occasion coincided with an earnings update shared by Pichai on X (formerly Twitter), which even drew praise from Elon Musk.