Inside the career rise of Sundar Pichai, Google and Alphabet’s current CEO

But the top job at Alphabet also comes with increased public and internal scrutiny.

In 2018, the House Judiciary Committee grilled the CEO about Google’s data privacy practices and plans with China.

Two years later, Pichai testified in front of Congress again over antitrust concerns. Two other major Google lawsuits were later filed by the US government over its alleged monopoly tactics.

Google has also dealt with internal turmoil after letting go of one of its top AI ethicists.

In December 2020, Google fired Timnit Gebru. Her exit came weeks after she was asked to retract a paper on the dangers of large language models and spoke out against the company’s treatment of minority employees. 

Google employees were “seriously pissed” over how the firing was handled, one told BI at the time, and Gebru said that Pichai and other managers helped create “hostile work environments.”

Pichai eventually apologized for how the company dealt with it.

“I want to say how sorry I am for that, and I accept the responsibility of working to restore your trust,” he wrote.

Also in 2020, Pichai was at the forefront of Google’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Under his leadership, Google launched initiatives to help search users find accurate, useful information about the coronavirus. 

And like many large tech companies, Alphabet recruited rapidly at the start of the pandemic. Alphabet hired nearly 37,000 new workers in the 12 months leading up to October 2022.

But from late 2022, Pichai had to oversee an era of cost-cutting at the company.

That culminated in job losses in January 2023, when Google layoffs affected 12,000 employees or 6% of its global workforce. Pichai said he took “full responsibility for the decisions that led us here.”

Over 1,400 Google employees wrote an open letter to Pichai about how the layoffs were handled. 

“Don’t be evil,” it read, a reference to the company’s original motto.

Googlers also criticized Pichai’s big payday in the face of the job cuts, accusing him of “destroying morale and culture” at Google.

Google also laid off hundreds more workers in its central engineering division and hardware team in early 2024.

Pichai has also had to deal with European regulatory issues. French regulators hit Google with a roughly $270 million fine in March 2024, accusing the company of using news outlet articles to train its Gemini AI model.