Neil Mohan, who is today known as the CEO of YouTube, was once offered a whopping $100 million by google to stop him from leaving the company. This was revealed recently in Zerodha co-founder Nikhil Kamath's podcast, where it was mentioned how there was a huge tussle between tech companies over talent at that time.

This incident is from 2011, when Neel Mohan was playing an important role in Google's ad and YouTube product development strategy. Nikhil Kamath said during the conversation, "I read that google gave you $100 million to not leave the company, not today, but 15 years ago. This amount was huge at that time." Neel Mohan did not deny this claim.

Why was this offer given?

According to a report in 2011, google gave this amount to Neil Mohan not in cash but in the form of restricted stock units (RSUs), which were to be paid gradually over time. This step was taken because twitter (which is known as X today) wanted to include Neil Mohan in its team. There, his old boss David Rosenblatt had already joined the board and wanted to make him the Chief Product Officer of Twitter.

Neil Mohan's journey

Neil Mohan has studied electrical engineering from Stanford University. He started his career with Andersen Consulting (now Accenture), after which he joined a company named NetGravity. This startup was later bought by DoubleClick, where Neil reached the position of Vice President. In the year 2007, google bought DoubleClick for $3.1 billion, after which Neil joined Google's ad team and became an important pillar in the company's strategy. By 2011, he had become so important to google that the company offered $100 million to retain him — and this move proved to be beneficial for the company.

Neil was not the only target of Twitter

Neil Mohan was not the only google executive whom twitter wanted to add. During this time, twitter also approached Sundar Pichai, who was then heading Chrome and Chrome OS at Google. To keep him, google offered him stocks worth about $50 million.