Nikesh Arora Biography

Nikesh Arora is the former President and Chief Operating Officer of SoftBank Corp; he was with SoftBank Corp from October 2014 until June 2016. Prior to joining SoftBank, he was a top executive at Google where he held multiple senior operating leadership roles. At one point in his career, he was Google's highest paid executive—he received a compensation package of $57.1 million in 2013. While working with SoftBank, he earned a salary of $208 million over a period of two years which made him one of the highest-paid executives in the world. Born in India, he earned a bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (BHU) Varanasi and worked for a while with Wipro. He then proceeded to the United States to pursue a degree in management from Northeastern University. He began his career working with Fidelity Investments as an analyst and simultaneously worked towards his CFA (Chartered Financial Analyst) designation. During the 2000s he joined Google, a relatively small company at that time. At Google he held multiple senior operating leadership roles, eventually reaching the position of Senior Vice President and Chief Business Officer. He quit Google in 2014 to join SoftBank as President and Chief Operating Officer. His abrupt resignation from SoftBank in June 2016 came as a shock to many in the business fraternity.