In the latest lists of America's highest-paid CEOs for 2023, Nikesh Arora, CEO of Palo Alto Networks, has taken the second spot, and is from India. This is the sort of trend that has seen a great number of CEOs of Indian descent on the lists: in fact, there are 17 such CEOs on the top 500 lists compiled by The Wall Street Journal.
He is also the second highest-paid CEO of Indian origin, standing at 11th in the overall list. Surprisingly, Arora and Narayen performed better than some big names including Tesla's Elon Musk who had nothing in his compensation kitty.
Meanwhile, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg had $24.40 mn, and Alphabet's CEO of Indian origin, Sundar Pichai, had $8.80 mn in his pocket in the same period.
Arora went to Delhi's Air Force Public School, before rising to global notice as Google's chief business officer and then making history for Japan with his compensation package after joining SoftBank in 2014.
Since 2018, Arora has headed Palo Alto Networks, which deals in cybersecurity. His compensation is mainly in the form of equity awards, which include shares vested over a period of three years.
Narayen hails from Hyderabad and has been heading Adobe since 2007, which he joined in 1998.
The highest-paid CEO, with earnings of $162 million, is Hock Tan of Broadcom.
Sanjay Malhotra of Micron Technology, Ajei Gopal of Ansys, and Reshma Kewalramani of Vertex Pharmaceuticals take the third, fourth, and fifth spots, respectively, among the Indian Americans. Their remunerations range from $20.59 million to $25.28 million.
Other Indian-origin CEOs who find mention in the list include Arvind Krishna of IBM, Badrinarayn Kothandaraman of Enphase Energy, and Sanjiv Lamba of Linde.
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