Meet Nikesh Arora: Indian-American tech non-founder CEO becomes billionaire

Dubai: For most billionaires on the world’s rich list, their wealth and net worth comes from entrepreneurship and their own businesses. It is rare to see non-founder tech CEOs breaking into the billionaire’s club – and that’s exactly what 55-year-old Nikesh Arora has done.

Arora, who is currently CEO at Palo Alto, is not the first to do this – Tim Cook, Apple CEO is another non-founder CEO who is also a billionaire. Arora has been steadily amassing wealth, and it’s all thanks to his successful management strategies, based on the results the Indian-American has given each of the companies he worked for.

Nikesh Arora is an electrical engineer graduate from Indian Institute of Technology (Banaras Hindu University) in Varanasi and did a short stint at Wipro before moving to the US for studies. He started his finance career at Fidelity Investments before starting and later managing T-Motion at German telecoms firm T-Mobile.

Arora is known to bag very high compensation packages. At Google, where he started working in 2004, he became the firm's highest-paid executive after getting a compensation package worth about $51 million in 2012. And Arora was on his way to collecting stock awards worth at least $200 million by the time he left.

Poached in 2014 by SoftBank Group Corp.'s Masayoshi Son – and touted as the legendary investor's likely successor – he amassed a $135 million first-year compensation package that broke Japanese records and made him the world's best-paid executive. Arora joined cybersecurity firm Palo Alto Inc. in 2018 when he received a $125 million stock and options compensation package.

At Palo Alto, Arora’s compensation package of stock options was contingent on achieving share-price targets – and he did that, marking a 300 per cent gain in the company’s share price. After a series of high-profile hacking incidents that disrupted casinos, ports and even Treasury markets, the company's share price has more than quadrupled since Arora joined.

This has catapulted the executive to billionaire status - Arora's Palo Alto stake is now worth $830 million. Arora sold nearly $300 million worth of stock in 2023 after exercising some of the options. If we combine the pay awards Arora received in his career, his net worth stands at $1.5 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

He's primed to continue building his fortune at Palo Alto Networks. Arora's 2023 compensation includes a maximum of 750,000 stock awards that vest upon the achievement of certain performance conditions, which would currently be worth more than $220 million.