Nikesh Arora is second highest-paid CEO in US: WSJ
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Arun Kumar- 0
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Nikesh Arora (courtesy of Twitter)
Nikesh Arora, the India-born CEO of Palo Alto Networks, has been ranked second by The Wall Street Journal in its list of highest-paid US chief executives for 2023.
With a reported equity-heavy $151.43 million pay package last year, Arora appeared in second-place after Broadcom’s Hock Tan with earnings of $162 million, according to the Journal.
The cybersecurity company said Monday it has generated revenue of nearly $5.84 billion and net income of almost $2.22 billion for the first three quarters of its fiscal 2024 year.
READ: Google veteran Nikesh Arora becomes a billionaire (January 4, 2024)
A total of 17 executives of Indian descent have been named among the CEOs of S&P 500 companies.
Arora, who studied at the Air Force Public School in Delhi, before coming to the US, grabbed international attention when he became the chief business officer at Google. He left Google in 2014 to head SoftBank in a compensation package that was then said to be a record for Japan.
Other notable Indian-origin people in the list include Adobe’s Shantanu Narayen (11th, $44.93 million), Sanjay Malhotra of Micron Technology (63rd, $25.28 million), Ansys’ Ajei Gopal (66th), Reshma Kewalramani (118th), IBM’s Arvind Krishna (123rd), Badrinarayn Kothandaraman of Enphase Energy (135th), Sanjiv Lamba (143rd), Surendralal Karsanbhai (158th), Anirudh Devgun (172nd), Shankha Mitra (174th), Sumit Roy of Realty Income (268th), Satish Dhanasekaran (319th), Prahlad Singh (357th), Sundar Pichai of Alphabet (364th, $8.80 million), Udit Batra (367th), and Sundarrajan Nagarajan (389th).
Post honeymoon, Nikesh Arora quits Google to join Japanese telecom giant SoftBank (July 18, 2014)
Born and raised in Hyderabad, Narayen has been the CEO of Adobe since 2007 after first joining the firm in 1998. Prominent tech leaders such as Elon Musk of Tesla and Sundar Pichai opted for non-traditional compensation structures in 2023.
The Journal said its analysis looked at hundreds of S&P 500 companies and their CEOs overall, ranking 415 of them by the size of their reported 2023 total compensation of cash and equity awards.
Four Indian Americans among Forbes 400 2022 (September 29, 2022)
The median amount S&P companies compensated their CEOs rose more than 8% year-over-year to $15.7 million in 2023, per the outlet’s analysis.