What has long since become synonymous with searching the Internet in today’s parlance started exactly 25 years ago in a garage in Menlo Park, California: Larry Page (50) and Sergey Brin (50) worked together on September 4, 1998 to create Google and forever changed the way people around the world access the internet. Now, a quarter of a century after that eureka moment, their lives have changed significantly – not least because of the more than 150 billion US dollars that the two are said to be heavy together.
According to the most recent ranking by the US business magazine “Forbes”, Page’s assets will amount to around 79 billion US dollars in 2023, which puts him in 12th place in the top list. Brin is two places below that around 76 billion US dollars on the credit side.
As incredible as these numbers may already be, a year ago the bank statements of the two tech giants were even better: Like Jeff Bezos (59), the two Google inventors benefited massively from the corona pandemic, and their respective assets have since increased 111 billion (Page) and 107 billion (Brin).
Something else unites Page and Brin in addition to incredible wealth: Since 2019, they have largely put the fate of their company into the hands of others and withdrew from the operative business. Page resigned as CEO of Google parent company Alphabet, Brin as its president. As a result, overall responsibility was transferred to Sundar Pichai (51), who had already been CEO of the subsidiary Google Inc. since 2015. However, both men remain board members and influential shareholders.
Page had recently made headlines with a failed project: Under the name “Kitty Hawk” he had financed a start-up that had set itself the task of developing flying taxis. In October of last year, however, the people behind it had to admit that this was too ambitious an undertaking.
Brin, on the other hand, is said to have increasingly intervened directly in the fortunes of Google. It was only in July of this year that the Wall Street Journal reported that he had recently been seen more and more often in the office. So he became interested in taking part in the development of Google’s in-house AI called Gemini.
