Nikesh Arora, an India-born CEO of Palo Alto Networks, has been ranked second on The Wall Street Journal’s list of highest-paid US chief executives for 2023. His compensation package, predominantly equity-based, amounted to $151.43 million last year, placing him just behind Hock Tan of Broadcom, who earned $162 million.
Palo Alto Networks announced that for the first three quarters of its fiscal 2024 year, it generated almost $5.84 billion in revenue and nearly $2.22 billion in net income.
Arora’s ascent to prominence began at the Air Force Public School in Delhi before he moved to the US. He gained international recognition as Google’s chief business officer and later made headlines when he joined SoftBank in 2014 with a record-setting compensation package for Japan.
Among the S&P 500 companies, 17 CEOs of Indian descent have been listed, including notable figures like Shantanu Narayen of Adobe, who ranked 11th with $44.93 million, and Sanjay Malhotra of Micron Technology, who ranked 63rd with $25.28 million. Others on the list are Ajei Gopal of Ansys, Reshma Kewalramani, IBM’s Arvind Krishna, Badrinarayan Kothandaraman of Enphase Energy, Sanjiv Lamba, Surendralal Karsanbhai, Anirudh Devgun, Shankha Mitra, Sumit Roy of Realty Income, Satish Dhanasekaran, Prahlad Singh, Sundar Pichai of Alphabet, Udit Batra, and Sundarrajan Nagarajan.
Narayen, originally from Hyderabad, has been Adobe’s CEO since 2007, having joined the company in 1998. Prominent tech leaders like Elon Musk and Sundar Pichai adopted non-traditional compensation structures in 2023.
The Wall Street Journal’s analysis, which included hundreds of S&P 500 companies, ranked 415 CEOs based on their total reported compensation for 2023, including both cash and equity awards. The median compensation for S&P 500 CEOs increased by over 8% year-over-year, reaching $15.7 million in 2023.
