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.
Image Credit: Bloomberg
2 of 8
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.
Image Credit: Bloomberg
3 of 8
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.
Image Credit: Bloomberg
4 of 8
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.
Image Credit: AP
5 of 8
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.
Image Credit: Bloomberg
6 of 8
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.
Image Credit: Bloomberg
7 of 8
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.
Image Credit: Bloomberg
8 of 8
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.
Image Credit: Bloomberg
This website stores cookies on your computer. These cookies are used to improve your experience and provide more personalized service to you.
Both on your website and other media. To find out more about the cookies and data we use, please check out our Privacy Policy.