Google co-founders step down as execs of parent Alphabet
Google co-founders step down as execs of parent
Alphabet
Google
CEO Sundar Pichai will stay in his role and also become CEO of Alphabet.
By David
Ingram and Associated Press December 3, 2019 1:49 PST
SAN FRANCISCO — Google co-founders Larry
Page and Sergey Brin are stepping back from their day-to-day roles within the
parent company, Alphabet, but plan to remain as board members and keep their
ownership stakes.
The two tech billionaires said in a blog post Tuesday
that they were ready to hand over the company reins to Sundar Pichai, who
became CEO of Google in 2015 and will now take on the additional role of
Alphabet CEO.
Alphabet is the umbrella corporation
created in 2015 to hold Google and keep it structurally separate from the
company’s “other bets,” such as the driverless car company Waymo, the life
sciences unit Verily and other miscellaneous businesses.
Page had been serving as CEO of Alphabet,
while Brin had been president of Alphabet. But they had been noticeably absent
from company events in recent months, skipping entirely the company’s regular all-hands
meetings this year, according to BuzzFeed News.
They wrote in the blog post that the
company had “evolved and matured” in the two decades since its founding.
“Today, in 2019, if the company was a
person, it would be a young adult of 21 and it would be time to leave the
roost,” the two wrote.
“While it has been a tremendous privilege
to be deeply involved in the day-to-day management of the company for so long,
we believe it’s time to assume the role of proud parents — offering advice and
love, but not daily nagging!” they added.
The two executives nurtured a squeaky
clean “Don’t Be Evil” brand at Google since its founding, though its reputation
has been tarnished in recent years by a series of scandals, including payouts
to former executives accused of
sexual misconduct.
Labor unrest has
also erupted at Google’s
offices, from the San Francisco Bay Area to Pittsburgh to Zurich. Four former
Google engineers fired last week said Tuesday that they plan to file charges with
the National Labor Relations Board, alleging unfair labor practices.
The company also faces an array of
challenges on legal and regulatory fronts, from questions about the spread of conspiracy theories on
its video service YouTube to an antitrust review of
its power in the marketplace to a new European review of
its data and privacy practices.
Still, Google remains one of the clearest
success stories in the U.S. tech industry, emerging from a Silicon Valley garage in 1998 to
become a web and advertising giant that bested a series of other search engines
and is now the largest ad platform on the internet.
Alphabet took in about $150 billion in revenue for
the 12 months ending Sept. 30, mostly from Google ad revenue, and reported that
sales were still growing about 20 percent from a year earlier.
Ad sales have launched both men into
extreme wealth. Page is worth about $62.6 billion, making him the
seventh-richest person in the world, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Brin trails
only slightly at about $60.7 billion, ranking 11th worldwide.
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