What do you know about Larry Page? Have you heard of Google, the company he co-founded with Sergey Brin over a decade ago?
Unlike people like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, Larry Page is often ignored in terms of popularity and giving people reasons to talk about him. However, when investing some time in learning about him, you know there’s a lot to know.
He is, according to Forbes, the eighth richest person in the world, and his net worth continues growing in real-time. At the moment of the list, he had about $91.5 billion. Where does he stand today?
We need to go over Larry’s life and make sure every revenue, business venture, and investment is included to understand how he has become one of the wealthiest people in the world.
Early Years: Who Is Larry Page
On March 26, 1973, Larry Page was born in East Lansing (home to Michigan State University), Michigan.
Among his family, Carl Victor Page, Sr., his father, has been called a pioneer in computer science. As a result, Larry began playing with computers at an early age and showed great interest in new inventions.
From 1975 to 1979, he attended Okemos Montessori School. After graduating from it, he attended East Lansing High School.
Larry attended Interlochen Centre for the Arts for two summers while he was still in high school. There, he focused on the saxophone. He received a Bachelor of Science degree in computer engineering at the University of Michigan for his undergraduate education.
Beyond this, there isn’t much information about the early life of the magnate, but we are then introduced to his life in college and the creation of Google.
After he graduated from the University of Michigan, he enrolled in Stanford University’s computer science program. He was required to choose a topic for his dissertation as part of the program.
He decided to study the mathematical properties and link structure on the World Wide Web. The most important revelation of his research was the fact that one could determine a website’s quality by how many backlinks it received. This was similar to how academics use citations as a way of judging quality.
While he was immersed in this link structure and his own research, Larry and Sergey Brin, a fellow Ph.D. student, eventually joined forces to complete the project that has come to be known as “Backrub.”
They created a paper called “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine.” Their paper was the most downloaded scientific document on the Internet in its time.
They used the Backrub web crawler to create an algorithm that gave each website an internet quality score. This algorithm was called “PageRank,” which was both Larry’s last name and a reference to the page on the Internet.
The next step was to create a search engine that displayed results. This was when Google came to play.
However, Page and Brin were unable to launch their site right away after being kicked off campus because they used too many University computer resources.
Fortunately, followed by this incident, Larry and Sergey founded Google in 1998 as a private company.
The original domain name was “Googol,” which is actually a number consisting of one followed by one hundred zeros.
They were able to launch the company with the initial investment of $100,000 provided by one of their professors David Cheriton.
Growing Google: Going Public
Unlike what many people believe, the fact that a company goes public will boost its stocks and value. Staying private is often the opposite and rings a belt around the development and growth of the business.
To make sure Google continuously grew, it went public under Eric Schmidt, the CEO who was brought in to transform the company into a professional enterprise.
Schmidt was the CEO from 2004 to 2011, when Larry took over as Google’s CEO once more after giving up the role initially for Eric to handle the process.
Next, Google bought YouTube, the most popular site for user-submitted streaming video, in 2006 for $1.65 billion. This helped expand the business and have part of the Internet monopoly in their hands at the time.
Page and Brin had announced in 2015 that Alphabet would be the new parent company to manage Google and its subsidiaries.
While Larry was elected Alphabet’s president, Brin was chosen as the CEO, with Sundar Pichai taking over as Google’s top executive.
Page and Brin were able to leave the day-to-day operations and management of the company they founded since the CEO was absent from Alphabet meetings and quarterly earnings calls. The president didn’t have to take that many responsibilities.
Page decided not to attend the Senate Intelligence Committee hearings on Big Tech’s use to interfere in foreign elections in 2018.
Despite the company’s success and continued growth in the market, Larry announced on December 3, 2019, that he would be stepping down as Alphabet’s CEO and president and will now hand the reins over to Pichai.
The duo (Page and Bring), Alphabet’s largest shareholders, were expected to continue their influence on the company’s direction, and today, the company generates over $150 billion in revenues.
Due to his labor in the industry and contributions, Larry Page has been honored by many professional organizations. He received an honorary MBA at IE Business School and the Maxim Foundation Prize for Engineering in 2004.
He is also a Fellow of Columbia University’s Marconi Foundation and holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Michigan.
Net Worth: How Much Is Larry Page Worth?
It isn’t a secret that Page’s main source of income comes from the stakes, and he shares his own at the company he founded with Sergey Bring.
In addition, it is important to note that Larry’s is the actual mind behind the central idea of Google as the principle and the main program of the search engine was created by him.
Thus, he is worth more than his partner and friend, but by a lot?
Today, Page’s and his personal net worth hit the $127.5 billion mark, according to Forbes, in real-time. However, he has hit the $131 billion milestones before going a bit lower based on specific revenues in Alphabet.
With this in mind, how is the distribution of his fortune?
First, his Alphabet stake of roughly 6%, and along with Sergey, they control 51% of the company’s voting right with super-voting shares.
Since 2004, with Alphabet’s IPO but first Google, Larry has sold shares worth $9 billion from both companies. In addition, he holds Class A, B, and C shares of Alphabet.
He also owns 20 million shares of Alphabet stock.
Entering a bit his private life, since 2007, Larry and Lucinda Southworth have been married. They were married on Necker Island, Richard Branson’s private island, and have two children together.
Part of his fortune is distributed in the real estate property he bought in Palo Alto, a home of 9,000 feet worth $7.2 million in 2005.
The Pages started tearing down many of the houses near their primary residence in 2009, and they have continued to do so ever since to expand the property. Of course, all the houses and spaces have been bought before doing so.
In addition, he also spent $45 million on a 193-foot yacht called Senses in 2011.
Larry and his family moved to Fiji during the COVID-19 pandemic, where they purchased at least one private island and possibly several others. These islands are supposed to cost over $70 million each and add to the net worth.
Charity & Social Impact: Inside Larry Page’s Contributions
Besides being one of the wealthiest people in the world and a genius regarding tech and the Internet, Page is known for being quite a philanthropist… In his own way.
He has given away billions in charity and social events that include holidays every year. An example was in 2015 when he gave $9 million through his own charity foundation.
He added more than millions to this donation, and in 2017, he contributed $180 million to several causes in order to help with Christmas gifts.
Most of the prominent donations of the magnate have been based on holidays and specific causes. Putting all of them together along with the previous ones mentioned, he has contributed over $2 billion to his Carl Victor Page Memorial Foundation.
Other foundations based on children’s education, health, and lifestyle have been on the list of Page for a while.
The former CEO has made many donations to contribute to the crisis in Africa and other countries in dry situations. However, none of them has been made through traditional charities.
In fact, Page believes it is a waste of time to give the money to those foundations since “none of them use it for the purposes promised.” As a result, he prefers to contribute directly to the causes or use his own foundation.
However, he is also known for having quite a weird concept of what charity is.
According to the tech-genius in 2014, he believes companies like SpaceX and Tesla are already philanthropic and that people should invest in them. This is due to the nature of Musk’s companies to aim for renewable resources and bet for the electrical field to avoid contamination.
Many believe most of the money Page says to invest in charity goes to, actually, those companies and many others with similar visions.
Although there are reports of the previous donations and contributions mentioned, there isn’t anything specific about general charitable giving.
On the other hand, Larry’s social impact is entirely related to his contribution to the Internet. In addition to Google and Alphabet, he provided funds to a company called Kitty Hawk in 2018.
The main goal of the business is to begin the certification process on a fully electric and self-piloting flying taxi. This goes quite well with what he considers to be charity and philanthropy.
Larry Page Is the Best Investment Inspiration
For people to feel motivated to learn, work, or do something that they have been struggling with, they look for positive examples.
Page is one of those examples of how people can take action and get what they want as long as there is hard work and passion involved.
Larry Page is the one who invented Google and the concept of Search Engine overall, but more than being a genius in this field, he has proven several times to know where to place his money.
Although some business ventures have not been made public or announced, it is known he has invested in several companies that do not include Tesla and SpaceX but other big names.
We could continue to talk about him, how great he is in business, but we believe we have given you enough reasons to support his career and have a better look for inspiration.
Now, there’s something we would suggest you consider when looking up to him and wanting to invest in something on your own: The Internet in the past, present, and future. Hence, it is a good option to bet for similar opportunities related to it.
Among the options available, we can continue on this path and recommend an idea: Renting web sites.
Businesses and companies aren’t going back to the days when people had to travel to work. This doesn’t mean the traditional design isn’t relevant. Some people still need it.
But, these ideas tend to be a bit more limited compared to the digital ones. We think renting websites is a great option and a good example to understand this better.
This business model is focused on creating websites for small businesses and individuals who want to gain clients.
Your job is to find them, build their sites, and make sure they rank high on Google. This will allow you to bring in clients for them.
While individuals and companies would often create their own websites, this can be time-consuming, expensive, and tedious. This is why many people hire someone to do the job.
This is where you play a key role and manage all operations and steps necessary to make it possible.
Simple & Comfortable
You don’t require an office or talent. All you need is a computer and a few hundred dollars in your bank account to invest.
Let’s not forget to teach yourself a few things to help you build websites and run a rental business in this niche. For it, it is easy to find a course that will guide you through the steps.
This is the #1 training program that we recommend. It focuses on the fundamentals of your business and shows how you can get started with your computer.
This program will provide technical knowledge and terminology about small businesses and clients and provide you with all the information that you need to succeed.
However, it will be focused on you and the skills you have to make this journey a success.
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