Google Founders Step Down After 21 Years

Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google in 1998, stepped down from executive roles in December 2019, and still control the company to this day. All three things are true at the same time, which is why the question "who owns Google" almost always gets the wrong answer.

Who founded it, who runs it, and who controls it

These are three different roles, and at Google they sit in different hands:

• Founded by: Larry Page and Sergey Brin, out of a PhD project at Stanford, in 1998.
• Run by: Sundar Pichai, who has led Google since 2015 and took on the executive chairmanship of Alphabet, the holding company, when the founders stepped away in December 2019.
• Controlled by: still Page and Brin. They left day-to-day operations, remained on the board, and kept their Class B shares, which carry ten votes each.

The numbers are in the proxy statement sent to Alphabet shareholders in 2026: Page holds 27.4% of voting power and Brin holds 25.3% — combined, 52.7%, a majority. Their economic stake is much smaller, around 6% of shares. Sundar Pichai, who runs everything, holds less than 1% of voting power.

When they stepped down, the two wrote that it was time to take on "the role of proud parents: offering advice and love, but not daily nagging." It read nicely in the announcement, and it's an accurate description of the arrangement: they don't run day-to-day operations and they still get to decide what matters.

What Alphabet actually is

Alphabet was created in 2015 as the holding company that sits above Google. Search, YouTube, Android, Maps, and the cloud business all live inside Google. Outside of it, under the same holding company, sit long-term bets like Waymo, self-driving cars, Verily, healthcare, and Wing, drone delivery. The structure exists so that an expensive, distant bet doesn't have to justify itself every quarter against the search business's results.

Why this matters if you run a small company

Because the same question applies to your business, and the answer is usually worse. Whoever operates it isn't necessarily who controls it, and whoever controls it isn't necessarily who's visible. At Google this was designed on purpose, with two share classes and a board. At most small companies, it's an accident: the domain is registered under the nephew who built the site, the ad account belongs to a former agency, the Google Business Profile was created with the email of an employee who's since left.

It's worth doing the inventory once: whose name is the domain under, who administers the company's Google Business Profile, whose ad account is it, and where is the client list kept. If the answer to any of these isn't "mine," it's the same control problem, without any of the benefits of having been planned.

A website on your own domain, with access under your name, is the part of this we handle in website creation. And the logic behind why control changes hands is in the post about why someone gets fired from their own company.