Lawrence Edward Page (born March 26, 1973) is an American billionaire business magnate, computer scientist and internet entrepreneur best known for co-founding Google with Sergey Brin.
Page was chief executive officer of Google from 1997 until August 2001 when he stepped down in favor of Eric Schmidt and then again from April 2011 until July 2015 when he became CEO of its newly formed parent organisation Alphabet Inc. which was created to deliver “major advancements” as Google’s parent company, a post he held until December 4, 2019 when he along with his co-founder Brin stepped down from all executive positions and day-to-day roles within the company. He remains an Alphabet board member, employee, and controlling shareholder.
As of June 2023, Page has an estimated net worth of $112 billion according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, making him the eighth-richest person in the world. He has also invested in flying car startups Kitty Hawk and Opener.
Page is the co-creator and namesake of PageRank, a search ranking algorithm for Google. He received the Marconi Prize in 2004 with co-writer Brin.
Page is a co-founder of Alphabet, the holding company for Google, the world’s largest search engine operator. The Mountain View, California-based company was set-up in 1998 and reported revenue of $283 billion in 2022. The group’s divisions include Gmail, Android and video sharing service YouTube.
The majority of Page’s fortune is derived from his stake in Alphabet, the parent company of Google, the world’s largest search engine, according to Net Market Share.
The billionaire owns Class B and C shares, giving him about 6% of the business, according to its 2023 proxy and an April 2022 company filing. Page’s Class B stock doesn’t trade; it’s valued using current market prices for the company’s Class A shares, as the B shares are convertible into the publicly traded shares on a one-for-one basis, according to the company’s proxy. He owns almost 20 million shares of Alphabet Class C stock, which are also traded, according to the April 2022 filing.
Since Google’s 2004 initial offering, the billionaire has sold shares of both Alphabet and Google valued at more than $10 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The value of his cash investments is based on an analysis of those sales, insider transactions, asset sales and taxes.
This net worth calculation uses an investment allocation favoring venture funds and clean technology, which is in line with co-founder Brin’s public comments about his investments.
No response was received to requests for comment on Page’s net worth emailed to Google’s press office.
Biography
Education: Stanford University, University of Michigan
The East Lansing, Michigan, native studied computer science at the University of Michigan before pursuing a doctorate at Stanford. He met fellow graduate student Sergey Brin in 1995, and the pair later worked on a research project dubbed BackRub that focused on maximizing Internet searches by analyzing the interconnectivity between websites. The result was Google, which was incorporated in 1998 after the pair secured $100,000 from investor Andy Bechtolsheim.
The partners served as Google co-presidents until 2001, when they hired former Novell executive Eric Schmidt to become CEO. Google sold shares at $85 in a public offering in 2004. In the IPO, the company all but refused help from investment banks, a ploy that highlighted its stated mission, “Don’t be evil.” Since then, Google has become the world’s biggest Internet company, with revenue of $90 billion in 2016.
Google has been making forays into other businesses, including the company’s Android operating system, which powered 81% of smartphones that shipped in the US in 2015, according to researcher IDC. Page took over as CEO in 2011, after critics began to gripe that Google had lost its nimbleness. He became CEO of Alphabet, a holding company for Google and its other businesses, in October 2015. An advocate of clean tech, Page was an early investor in electric-car maker Tesla Motors.
Milestones
- 1973 Lawrence Page is born in East Lansing, Michigan.
- 1995 Enrolls at Stanford for graduate studies; meets Sergey Brin.
- 1996 Starts a research project on Internet searches with Brin.
- 1998 Formally incorporates Google with $100,000 in financing.
- 2001 Steps down as Google co-president after hiring Eric Schmidt.
- 2004 Google has an initial public offering at $85 a share.
- 2004 Co-founds philanthropic organization Google.org.
- 2015 Alphabet holding company structure is announced.
