Google sales boss Nikesh Arora made $26.3 million in 2009

Nikesh Arora, Google's global sales boss, is the top earning Indian at the global search giant.

According to an SEC filing, Arora received $26.3 million in compensation in 2009. This also makes him one of the highest paid executives in America.

While the SEC filing shows Nikesh pulling in big bucks, it's a bit misleading. An accounting rule from the SEC pushed his total compensation to those heights. His cash bonus and salary stood at $3.7 million.

Arora is responsible for all Google's revenue and customer operations, as well as marketing and partnerships. He has a proven track record at Google, having spent the last four and a half years building our European operations into a substantial business.

He became the global ad sales boss in April 2009 when Omid Kordestani stepped down from the role.

Arora, who is 40, was recruited by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin after an interview conducted among the artefacts of the British Museum.

'We walked around. We looked at the exhibits and a lot of our conversation was about the Rosetta stone,' Arora told The Independent after his appointment last year, referring to an Egyptian artefact that dates to 196 BC and is inscribed in three languages.

The Greek wording enabled scholars to decipher the hieroglyphics and was a major breakthrough in Egyptology. 'We discussed how it was an amazing parallel to Google translating its services around the world,' he told the newspaper.

As this informal interview concluded, Arora left the museum but Brin continued to tour the exhibits. Ten days later Arora learned that he had the job. He was the first Google vice president to be appointed outside the US.

Here's something else he told The Independent: 'I enjoy working in places which are very fast-moving and where things are changing. As my life takes on a steady pattern I do things to undo the pattern.'

Before joining Google, Arora was chief marketing officer and a member of the management board at T-Mobile, where he's said to have spearheaded all product development, terminals, brand and marketing activities of T-Mobile Europe.

He started working with Deutsche Telekom in 1999 and founded T-Motion PLC, a mobile multimedia subsidiary of T-Mobile International. In his pre-Deutsche Telekom days, Arora held management positions at Putnam Investments and Fidelity Investments in Boston.

Arora holds a master's degree and CFA certification from Boston College, an MBA from Northeastern University and a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the Institute of Technology in Varanasi, India.

Arora was born in Delhi to a father who was a financial planner for the Indian Air Force and a mother with a master's degree in mathematics. He left India at the age of 21 to study for an MBA in the United States.

Image: Google co-founder Larry Page with Nikesh Arora. Photograph: Eloy Alonso/Reuters