- The
Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have joined the $100 billion club. - Their net worths have risen by a combined $40 billion during the pandemic as tech stocks soar.
- Page and Brin own controlling shares in Google parent
Alphabet .
The Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are now worth more than $100 billion each, thanks to surging tech stocks.
Page and Brin join six other centibillionaires: Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, the Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates, LVMH CEO Bernard Arnault, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett.
Page is worth $103.6 billion, while Brin is worth $100.2 billion, according to estimates by Bloomberg's Billionaire Index.
Brin's fortune grew by $20.4 billion in the year to April 2021, while Page's rose by $21.2 billion, according to Bloomberg's calculations. Tech shares have risen rapidly since the start of the pandemic, and those in Google's parent company, Alphabet, have grown by more than 80% over the past year.
The pair owns controlling shares in Alphabet, with more than 50% of the total votes between them. The company brought in $46.43 billion in revenue for the fourth quarter of 2020, minus traffic-acquisition costs, up from $37.57 billion a year ago. Alphabet credited this to people using YouTube and Google Search more during the pandemic.
Page and Brin have stepped back from Google and Alphabet
Page and Brin started working on Google in 1996 while they were Ph.D. students at Stanford University alongside an unofficial "third founder," who left before it became a company. It's now the most-used website in the world.
In 2015, the pair founded the holding company Alphabet to manage both Google and other subsidiaries, including Waymo, DeepMind, and Sidewalk Labs. Brin became the president of the new company, and Page became its CEO. Page appointed Sundar Pichai to take over as CEO of Google.
In 2019, Page and Brin announced plans to step back from Alphabet and appointed Pichai as CEO. Pichai still consults the cofounders regularly, though they've had an increasingly hands-off approach, Insider's Hugh Langley has reported.
Page and Brin took salaries of $1 during their time at Google.
Alongside spending their fortunes on mansions, superyachts, and a 50-person plane, the duo also led an investment round of $40 million in Elon Musk's Tesla in 2006.