Sergey Brin and Larry Page are two of the richest people in the world, and their whole net worth stems from their genius creation: Google.
Sergey Brin and Larry Page will be remembered as some of the most consequential people of the early digital era. Their creation, the Google search engine, has quite literally changed the world forever with far reaching effects in the very fabric of our society. Page and Brin are also two of history’s richest people, with a net worth that could essentially buy them a small nation.
Larry Page himself seemed to be destined to great things in the realms of computer science. Both of his parents, Carl and Gloria, were computer engineers, with his father having earned a PhD in computer science from the University of Michigan.
Sergey Brin was also from a family of scientists, a mathematician and a researcher for NASA. Brin was born in Moscow during the Soviet Union, but thanks to his parents’ prominence they managed to migrate to the US in 1979.
Brin and Page met in Stanford when working on their doctorates. They found out through their research that it was possible to “rank” websites based on a series of data variables. From there, it was also possible to “look” for information on the entire web, providing the most reliable sources on top.
Page and Brin decided to name their creation “Googol”, which is an algebraic term to define the number 10 to the power of 100. They couldn’t remember how it was spelled though, so they went for “Google”. When they realized their mistake, it was too late to change it back.
How Google became profitable
Brin and Page were no businessmen. Their incredible computing skills were of no use in the harsh world of capitalism, so they decided to hire someone else as CEO of Google. Their choice fell upon Eric Schmidt, a computer engineer with a long experience as CEO.
Under Schmidt, Google would eventually become one of the most profitable businesses of all time. Initially, though, Google struggled to attract enough capital to survive: investors were skeptical that it could run without ads or any form of revenue.
Schmidt, Brin and Page came up with a solution that changed the internet forever. They discovered that Google users were providing the search engine with an unbelievable amount of data. This data could, in turn, be very useful for advertisement companies to target their ads better.
So, Google started selling user data to ad services, a system that immediately made them the most profitable company in the world.
Today, Larry Page and Sergey Brin own a combined 51% share in Alphabet, Google’s parent company. This makes them two of the world’s richest people: Page’s net worth amounts to $90.8 billion, while Brin’s sits at $87 billion.
The system created by Google to exploit user’s data became the norm in today’s digital world. It changed the concept of privacy forever, and many believe that we still have not seen its full impact yet.
Whatever the future holds, Google will keep being a part of it, at least for several decades to come.
