Provides updates on financial markets, stock performances, economic trends, and investment strategies. Covers updates and developments in the video game industry, including new game releases, updates, reviews, and events. Holding 108,036,557 shares, T.Rowe Price’s investment underscores its optimism towards Alphabet’s continued dominance and innovation. With 183,554,964 shares, State Street’s stake highlights its strategic investment in one of the tech world’s leading names. The largest institutional holder with 410,033,523 shares, showcasing its unwavering confidence in Alphabet’s potential for growth and innovation. The CEO of Alphabet and Google, Pichai owns 595,049 shares as of December 2023, reflecting his deep commitment and belief in the company’s mission and future.
The company quickly grew and expanded, and by 2004, after beating Yahoo! Google already became the most popular search engine in the world, with users searching on Google 200 million times a day. Looker, founded in 2011 by Lloyd Tabb, helps companies to easily extract and analyze data. Most legacy business intelligence systems at the time required users to have engineering and programming expertise to extract data and analyze it. Looker simplified the process by taking programming queries and modifying them to read more like natural languages, such as English. However, Google also generates revenue from other sources, including sales of apps, in-app purchases, hardware, and licensing and service fees, including those received from Google Cloud and other products. Alphabet Inc. (GOOGL), the parent company of Google, owns several other companies in addition to the search engine giant.
How Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin built their combined $257 billion net worth, and how they spend it
Brin’s 1996 resume remains accessible on as part of Stanford’s online archives, and you can still go read it right now. Among the projects he was working on at the time, prior to forming Google, include a movie rating platform and a code conversion tool for turning academic papers into HTML files. Page and Brin met at Stanford University in 1995, as both were in the school’s computer science graduate program. The origin of Google is a story about the origin of an idea, and that idea was Page’s vision that a World Wide Web search engine could rank links based on how often they were being linked by other pages.
- YouTube was founded in 2005 by three former PayPal employees who believed ordinary people would enjoy sharing their homemade videos online.
- By some accounts, they disagreed about nearly everything during that first meeting, but by the following year they struck a partnership.
- Advertising is thus a core part of Alphabet’s strategy and has guided many of its acquisition decisions, such as the purchase of DoubleClick in 2008 (see below).
- Google announced its planned buyout of Looker in June 2019, finalizing the purchase in 2020 and leveraging its capabilities through the Google Cloud service.
Initial public offering
Just as Page pulled off a disappearing act in 2015, Brin too became a hermit of sorts. It’s hard to find any information on what he’s been up to in the years since becoming president of Alphabet and leaving his role at Google proper. He is reportedly working on a giant “sky yacht,” an aircraft that will ferry supplies for humanitarian missions, and joined a chorus of fellow tech leaders last year in voicing concern for the rapid development of AI.
Meanwhile, Google’s own video platform, Google Video, who own google now which was also launched in 2005, had failed to generate much traffic. Google’s acquisition of YouTube in late 2006 gave it a new, powerful video platform. YouTube has grown into a significant source of Alphabet’s ad revenue, while also generating revenue through premium and YouTube TV subscriptions. Initially, Google monetized the service by allowing businesses to purchase ads that would be pushed to nearby users. Google announced its planned buyout of Looker in June 2019, finalizing the purchase in 2020 and leveraging its capabilities through the Google Cloud service.
Created by Google’s research lab X in 2011, Loon became a subsidiary of Alphabet in 2018. It launched its first commercial service in April, delivering takeaway food, coffee and medicines by drone to about 100 homes in Canberra, Australia. And in October, it said its AlphaStar program had reached the top league of one of the most popular esport video games, Starcraft 2.
But Pichai’s father planted the seeds of technology into his boy’s mind, partly thanks to his job at British conglomerate General Electric Company (not to be confused with the American General Electric). He has evidently used his talent to great effect at Google, which he joined in 2004. Products under his watch include Google’s web browser, Chrome, as well as the Android mobile operating system.
The company was involved in self-driving cars, wearable technology, the Nexus smartphone line, and numerous other product and experimental research efforts spanning artificial intelligence, cloud and quantum computing, and even fiber internet. Following the launch of Google X, the debut of Google Glass, and the unveiling of the company’s self-driving car project, the search giant turned its sights on the sciences. So the company, through its Google Ventures investment arm, created Calico, a company effectively aimed at curing death.
Page and Brin both have been taken with Teslas
The co-founder also liked the interpretation of “alpha-bet”, with alpha being an investment return above benchmark, and Alphabet a company that aims to make more money than it spends. Alphabet has created and acquired hundreds of companies over the years, though, as we’ve covered, some continue to operate within Google. Page and Brin also continue to play an active role in the Google and Alphabet businesses, though their official positions have changed over the years as they stepped down to make room for a new CEO. As you’re probably more than aware, Google is still around and some brands, like YouTube and Fitbit, continue to fall under the Google name. However, most companies owned by the tech giant now consider Alphabet their home instead. Updates on VPN technology, security features, service providers, privacy issues, and changes in regulations affecting VPN usage.
At its helm is Alphabet Inc., a conglomerate that not only encompasses Google’s vast array of services but also owns entities like YouTube and Fitbit. With a staggering revenue of $76.6 billion in Q and shares trading at $157.2, leading to a market cap of about $1.91 trillion, Alphabet’s ownership is a hot topic for tech enthusiasts and investors alike. Some of these companies are subsidiaries of Google, while others are separately owned by Alphabet.