Larry Page

Lawrence Edward Page set out as a graduate student to download the entire World Wide Web, and ended up building the tool the world uses to find anything on it. He is one of the least public of the great technology founders — and one of the richest people who has ever lived.

A House of Computers

He was born on 26 March 1973 in East Lansing, Michigan. Both his parents worked with computers. His father, Carl Victor Page Sr., was a professor of computer science and artificial intelligence at Michigan State University. His mother, Gloria, taught programming there.

The house was full of computers and science magazines, and he has said he was the first child at his primary school to hand in homework written on a word processor. He was also fascinated by the inventor Nikola Tesla, whose story — a brilliant inventor who died poor — convinced him that invention was not enough without a business to carry it.

Michigan and Stanford

He studied computer engineering at the University of Michigan, where he built a working inkjet printer out of Lego bricks. In 1995 he started a PhD in computer science at Stanford University.

During a campus tour for new students he was shown around by Sergey Brin, a second-year student. The two argued about almost everything. Within a year they were working together.

Ranking the Web

Page’s PhD idea was to study the links between web pages. He wanted to work backwards from each page to all the pages that linked to it, and he called the project BackRub.

The insight that followed was simple and powerful. A link from one page to another is a kind of vote. A page with many links pointing to it is probably important — and a link from an important page is worth more than a link from an obscure one. Page and Brin turned this into a mathematical formula, PageRank, named after Page himself.

At the time, search engines ranked results mainly by how often a word appeared on a page, which was easy to game and often useless. Ranking by links gave far better results. Page and Brin built a search engine on it, running on cheap computers in their university rooms, and named it after “googol”, the number one followed by a hundred zeros.

The Garage

They tried to sell the technology to existing search companies. Nobody would pay what they wanted. So in 1998 they decided to build a company themselves and left their PhDs unfinished.

In August 1998 Andy Bechtolsheim, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, wrote them a cheque for $100,000 made out to “Google Inc.” — a company that did not yet exist. They had to incorporate it before they could cash the cheque. Google was incorporated on 4 September 1998 and moved into a rented garage in Menlo Park, owned by Susan Wojcicki, who later became one of its most important executives.

Money

Google’s search was an immediate hit, but it made no money. In 2000 it launched AdWords, which placed small text ads next to search results, with advertisers bidding in an auction and paying only when someone clicked. The ads were relevant to what people were looking for, so people clicked on them. It became one of the most profitable businesses ever created.

Investors insisted that the young founders bring in an experienced chief executive. In 2001 Eric Schmidt took the job, and Page became president of products. For the next decade the company was run by the three of them together.

Google went public on 19 August 2004, using an unusual online auction for its shares. The founders created a two-class share structure that gave them lasting control, and wrote a letter to investors warning that Google was “not a conventional company”. The company then bought Android, a small mobile software startup, in 2005 and YouTube, for $1.65 billion, in 2006.

Alphabet

In April 2011 Page became chief executive again. He reorganised the company around a smaller number of big products, pushed Android and the Chrome browser, and made Google a mobile-first company.

In August 2015 he announced a new structure. Google became part of a holding company, Alphabet, alongside riskier projects such as the self-driving car business Waymo and life sciences. Page became Alphabet’s chief executive and Sundar Pichai took over Google.

In December 2019 Page and Brin stepped back from their executive roles, and Pichai became chief executive of Alphabet as well. Page remains a board member and, with Brin, holds shares that give the two founders control of a majority of Alphabet’s votes.

A Private Man

Page has spoken publicly very rarely since then. He has put money into flying-car companies and other long-shot technology. He married Lucinda Southworth, a research scientist, in 2007, and they have two children. In 2013 he revealed that he had a condition affecting his vocal cords, which limits how much he can speak.

The AI Race

When OpenAI released ChatGPT at the end of 2022, many saw it as the first serious threat to Google’s search business in two decades. The founders were reported to have returned to meetings about the company’s response. Google’s AI work was combined under Demis Hassabis in Google DeepMind, and its Gemini models became among the most capable in the world. By 2026 the head of Gemini described Page as involved in the company’s AI strategy.

Alphabet’s shares rose sharply through 2025 and 2026, and in April 2026 Forbes estimated Page’s fortune at more than $300 billion for the first time.

Big Ideas

Page pushed Google to think on a very large scale. He encouraged engineers to aim for ten times improvements rather than ten per cent, and the company let many staff spend part of their time on side projects. Gmail, launched on 1 April 2004 with a then enormous gigabyte of free storage, was one result. Google Books set out to scan the world’s books. Google Maps and Street View tried to map the whole planet.

In 2009 Google started a self-driving car project, which became Waymo, and in 2013 Page announced Calico, a company researching ageing. Not all of these bets worked, but they reflected his belief that a company with Google’s profits had a duty to attempt very hard problems.

Control and Scrutiny

The founders’ letter that accompanied Google’s listing in 2004 warned investors that the company would take a long-term view and would not be run to hit quarterly targets. To protect their control as the company issued more shares, Page and Brin later created a third class of shares with no votes at all, introduced in 2014.

That power has drawn legal challenges. In August 2024 a US federal judge ruled that Google had illegally maintained a monopoly in online search, notably by paying to be the default search engine on phones and browsers. In September 2025 the judge declined to order the sale of the Chrome browser, instead imposing narrower remedies. Google has appealed the ruling.

The measure of him is one idea, rigorously pursued: that the structure of the web itself could tell you what mattered on it. He turned a graduate student’s question into the way billions of people find information — and then kept control of it for more than a quarter of a century.

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