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Google cofounders Larry Page, left, and Sergey Brin, right, are now the seventh and eighth richest people on the planet, respectively, with a combined wealth of $180 billion.
Corbis via Getty Images
Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are $14 billion richer than they were Tuesday evening, after parent company Alphabet reported booming growth in quarterly earnings on Tuesday.
Shares of Alphabet have climbed 9.2% since trading opened Wednesday, after the company reported $56 billion in fourth quarter revenue — a 23% year-over-year jump that blew past analyst expectations.
According to Forbes’ Real-Time Rankings, Page’s wealth has grown by $7.1 billion, to $91.2 billion, as of 2:30 pm ET Wednesday. Page, Alphabet’s former CEO, is now the seventh richest person in the world. Brin, meanwhile, is up by $6.8 billion, to $88.4 billion. The former president of Alphabet surpassed Warren Buffett to become the planet’s 8th richest person, by Forbes’ count.
Driving the lion’s share of growth was Google’s advertising business, which generated $46.2 billion in fourth-quarter revenue, up 22% year-over-year, and marking a turnaround after a slight dip during 2020 when customers pulled ad spending due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Despite the huge gains in revenue, Google’s cloud business reported a $5.6 billion net loss after reinvesting heavily in sales as it chases market share against Amazon’s AWS and Microsoft Azure.
Page and Brin, who co-founded Google in 1998 when they were Ph.D students at Stanford, stepped back from their executive roles at the company in 2019. They remain board members and control voting rights over the company.
I’m a staff reporter at Forbes covering tech companies. I previously reported for The Real Deal, where I covered WeWork, real estate tech startups and commercial real
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I’m a staff reporter at Forbes covering tech companies. I previously reported for The Real Deal, where I covered WeWork, real estate tech startups and commercial real estate. As a freelancer, I’ve also written for The New York Times, Associated Press and other outlets. I’m a graduate of Columbia Journalism School, where I was a Toni Stabile Investigative Fellow. Before arriving in the U.S., I was a police reporter in Australia. Follow me on Twitter at @davidjeans2 and email me at djeans@forbes.com