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Pichai Sundararajan, better known as Sundar Pichai, is an Indian-American business executive who has been CEO of Google since 2015 and of its parent company Alphabet Inc. since 2019.
His current net worth is approximately $1.6 billion, but it wasn’t always like that. On June 14, 2026, Pichai delivered the commencement speech at Stanford University, where he studied, and looked back on his humble beginnings in India.
He spoke about the efforts his family had to do to send him to the U.S. back when Stanford gave him the chance of complementing his studies with an MS in materials science and engineering.
Who is Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO
During his speech, Pichai recalled a childhood that was comfortable for the most part, but not without hardship. “We worried about severe drought and whether the water trucks would arrive in time,” he said, adding that his family had to wait years to get a telephone, a TV, and a refrigerator.
Then came the opportunity that changed his life. “When the call from Stanford came, my father spent the equivalent of a year’s salary to buy my ticket. It was my first time on a plane,” he told the graduates.
Google’s CEO also talked about this part of his life during the virtual ceremony of YouTube’s Dear Class of 2020, when he added that the only thing that got him to where he is today was his passion for technology and an open mind.
The advice Pichai gave to Standford’s students
His arrival in California didn’t match what he had imagined. Driving from the airport with his host family, he remarked that the hills looked brown. His host, Jane Earl, gently corrected him: “We prefer to call it golden.”
For Pichai, that moment summed up the first piece of advice he shared with the graduates: choose optimism. “We don’t get to choose the world we graduate into, but we do get to choose how we frame our circumstances,” he said.
How did Pichai become Google’s CEO at 43 years old?
Sundar Pichai turned 54 last June and has been at Google since 2004. The India-born tech billionaire earned a degree in metallurgical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur before moving to the U.S., where he completed a master’s degree at Stanford.
He briefly worked for Applied Materials before earning an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 2002. In 2004, he joined Google to lead product management, and his early projects included the Google Toolbar and the development of the Chrome browser.
When Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin created Alphabet Inc. in 2015, Pichai was named CEO of Google. Four years later, he also became CEO of Alphabet after Page stepped down.