Pichai was the measured, mild-mannered political tenderfoot in a sea of Washington bombast.
His voice was so quiet at times he could barely be heard across the chambers of the House Judiciary Committee, and he faced a firing line of dour lawmakers, some of them intent on hammering the tech giant for alleged political bias.
But after nearly four hours of rambling questions and partisan bickering, Google chief executive Sundar Pichai emerged on Tuesday from his first-ever testimony to Congress almost entirely untouched.
«He didn’t make any enemies here today,» said Daniel Castro, vice president of the Washington think tank Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. «The people who were here trying to rattle him weren’t able to do it. Google came out unscathed.»
Pichai was the measured, mild-mannered political tenderfoot in a sea of Washington bombast, not showing agitation at the silliest of questions or taking his interrogators’ bait.
And after the hearing, with the high-stakes showdown behind him, one of the most powerful executives on the planet couldn’t help but smile. The two mock hearings in California and Washington he had sat for in preparation were a little less tough, Pichai said with a soft laugh later, following an interview at The Washington Post.
In Silicon Valley, Pichai, 46, is as close to rock-star royalty as one can get: an India-born engineer who rose through the ranks to helm one of the world’s most powerful tech empires.
