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Larry Page

b. 1973 Tier III

The professor's son whose link algorithm became Google

Portrait of Larry Page — Stansfield PL — 2009 — CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Larry Page grew up in East Lansing, Michigan, in a house where both parents taught computer science at Michigan State and treated the machine in the den as ordinary furniture. His father brought home an Exidy Sorcerer when Page was six, and he became, by his own account, the first kid at his elementary school to hand in an assignment typed on a word processor. He studied music at Interlochen's summer arts camp and later credited its discipline with his obsession with speed and precision in engineering. He earned a computer engineering degree with honors from the University of Michigan in 1995, where he had already proposed replacing the campus bus system with a personal transit network, then went to Stanford for a PhD he would not finish.

At Stanford, Page's doctoral adviser pointed him toward the link structure of the web, and he began treating hyperlinks the way academics treat citations, counting who pointed to what and how authoritative the pointer was. Sergey Brin joined the project, nicknamed BackRub, and the two turned it into PageRank, then Google, incorporated in 1998 out of a rented Menlo Park garage on a million dollars borrowed from friends and family. Page ran the company as CEO until investors pushed him to install Eric Schmidt in 2001, returned to the job in 2011, bought Android and pushed it to global dominance, restructured Google under a new holding company called Alphabet in 2015, and stepped down as its chief executive in December 2019, handing the role to Sundar Pichai.

Page's left vocal cord had been paralyzed since 1999, a condition doctors never fully explained, and in 2013 a cold left the right cord paralyzed too, thinning his voice permanently and forcing him to speak carefully to be understood at all. He later learned the underlying cause was likely Hashimoto's thyroiditis, an autoimmune disease, and put more than twenty million dollars into vocal-cord nerve research rather than discuss it publicly beyond a single announcement. The company he co-founded runs on knowing everything about everyone who searches it, and its own co-founder responded to that bargain by disappearing from view: no press conferences since 2015, no product launches or earnings calls addressed personally since 2013, years spent instead on flying cars, life-extension research and a stretch of the pandemic living quietly in Fiji.

Page remains a Google and Alphabet board member, its largest voting shareholder, and by most rankings one of the two or three richest people alive, worth well over two hundred billion dollars, mostly still in Alphabet stock he has never needed to sell. Colleagues now describe him less as an executive than a financier of his own curiosity, backing Kitty Hawk's flying-car project, funding Calico's search for treatments to extend the human lifespan, and starting a manufacturing startup, Dynatomics, in 2023. Whether history credits him mainly for PageRank, for Android, or for walking away from daily management while the company kept compounding without him remains an open question nobody can settle this early.

Lifespan

15401700180019002030

Larry Page's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

Notable works

The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine article
The PageRank paper, written with Sergey Brin 1998
Google company
Founded with Sergey Brin in a rented Menlo Park garage 1998
Android acquisition company
Bought for 50 million dollars; became the world's dominant mobile operating system 2005
Alphabet Inc. company
Restructured Google under a new holding company 2015
Calico company
Biotech venture aimed at extending the human lifespan 2013

Life in brief

with age at each point

March 26, 1973 aged 0 Born in Lansing, Michigan
1979 aged ~6 Receives an Exidy Sorcerer computer from his father at age six
1995 aged ~22 Earns a computer engineering degree from the University of Michigan
1995 aged ~22 Meets Sergey Brin at Stanford
1998 aged ~25 Co-founds Google in a rented Menlo Park garage
2001 aged ~28 Steps aside as CEO for Eric Schmidt
April 4, 2011 aged 38 Returns as Google's CEO
August 10, 2015 aged 42 Restructures Google under Alphabet Inc.
December 3, 2019 aged 46 Steps down as Alphabet's CEO