Nikesh Arora, of Indian origin, Ranks as Second Highest-Paid CEO in the US

May 22 :
The CEO of Palo Alto Networks, Nikesh Arora, who was born in India, came in second place on The Wall Street Journal's list of the highest-paid US chief executives for 2023. From the top 500 executives revealed on May 21, 17 are of Indian origin.

Arora gained widespread recognition after becoming Google's top business officer; he had previously attended Delhi's Air Force School Public. When he departed Google in 2014 to become CEO of SoftBank, he received a salary that was reportedly the highest in Japan at the time.

Arora founded Palo Alto Networks in 2018 and has been its CEO since then. Stock option earnings constituted the bulk of Arora's alleged $151.43 million in remuneration during his time at Palo Alto.

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).
Narayen, who originally hails from Hyderabad, has been with the company since 1998 and has served as CEO since 2007.

Hock Tan of Broadcom held the top spot on the overall WSJ list with earnings of $162 million. In 2023, notable tech executives including Sundar Pichai and Tesla's Elon Musk chose non-traditional pay approaches.