Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai has become a billionaire after the tech giant added over $1 trillion in market value and provided 120% returns to investors since 2023. As Alphabet's shares closed at an all-time high, the 53-year-old Indian-origin CEO became worth $1.1 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

This is an especially rare feat for a non-founding CEO, especially in the tech industry. Other top executives like Meta's Mark Zuckerberg and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang got their fortune due to the founding equity stakes in their companies.

Pichai is also the tech giant's longest-serving CEO, having completed 10 years in the role in August. In August, Pichai shared the earnings update on X, earning praise from SpaceX CEO Elon Musk.

"Just got off the earnings call - great quarter, and it was our (and my) 40th call as Alphabet. August will mark 10 years since we announced Alphabet. Been thinking about the incredible growth in our new businesses since then - Cloud, YouTube, Play, Subscriptions etc. To give a sense of progress, in 2015 all of Alphabet’s revenue added up to $75B. YouTube and Cloud alone ended 2024 at an annual run rate of $110B," he wrote. Musk called the milestone "impressive" to which Pichai responded with a simple folded hands emoji.

Born into a middle-class family in Tamil Nadu, Sundar Pichai grew up in a two-room apartment and won a scholarship to Stanford University in 1993. He was hired by Google in 2004 and worked his way up to the top job over the next decade. He helped lead the tech giant's Android division and developed the Chrome browser before taking over as CEO in 2015.

Sundar Pichai holds a modest 0.02% economic stake in Alphabet, which is valued at around $440 million. Most of his wealth is in cash.

By contrast, Alphabet co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are in an entirely different league. Page is worth $171.2 billion, while Brin has a net worth of $160.4 billion, making them among the seven richest people in the world.