New Google CFO gets $70M pay package
Ruth Porat, Google’s new chief financial officer, is joining a company that has more than 50,000 employees and is one of the most valuable corporations in the world. Thus, given Google is long past its early days, it’s not the kind of place that will make her a start-up billionaire.
Instead, she will have to settle for $65 million in stock grants, a $5 million signing bonus and a yearly salary of $650,000, according to a company filing to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday.
Porat, who is joining Google from her post as Morgan Stanley’s chief financial officer, will start her job May 26, according to the filing. Sometime within her first month, she will get a $5 million signing bonus; she would have to return that bonus, on a pro-rated basis, if she quits before her first anniversary.
On top of that, she will get a $25 million stock grant that will vest between the end of the year and 2017, along with another stock grant, for $40 million, that she will receive next year. That one vests from 2016 to 2019.
Her total compensation at Morgan Stanley was $10 million in cash and stock in 2013, according to Morgan Stanley’s latest annual report.
Porat — who will replace Patrick Pichette, who is retiring to relax and travel — also gets a $7,500 moving allowance, although it seems unlikely she will need it.
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Google used the same regulatory filing to announce that it had changed the way it will pay senior vice presidents. The company said that, starting next year, it will eliminate cash bonuses and replace them with stock grants every two years.
A Google spokeswoman declined to comment, but the company presumably made the change to align senior officers’ paychecks with the interest of its increasingly impatient shareholders.
As Google gets close to its 11th anniversary as a public company, the company is for the first time facing questions about its growth and stock price.
The company’s stock has been essentially flat from a year ago, and shareholders would like Google to use some of its $65 billion cash hoard to either issue a dividend or try and lift the stock price by buying back shares.
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