Sergey Brin: Googling billions

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New episodes of Good Bad Billionaire will be released weekly on Mondays wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

But if you're in the UK, you can listen to the latest episodes a week early first on BBC Sounds.

Welcome to Good, Bad, Billionaire from the BBC World Service.

Each episode, we pick a billionaire and we find out how they made their money.

And then we judge them.

Are they good, bad, or just another billionaire?

My name is Zing Sing and I'm a journalist, author, and podcaster.

And I'm Simon Jack, I'm the BBC's business editor.

And this episode, we've got the man who revolutionized the way that we search for information.

It might even be the man who invented how you found this podcast.

And in fact, invented a verb, and that verb is to Google.

That man is none other than Sergey Britton.

Co-founder of Google and about the seventh or eighth richest person in the world with these tech guys, it all depends on what their share price is doing on any given day.

But currently he's still sitting pretty in the top 10 and at the age of 50 he is worth $135 billion.

Now we actually looked this up and this is actually around the GDP of Morocco.

Now the majority of his fortune obviously comes from his stake in Alphabet.

That is the parent company of Google.

And this is all based off the search engine that he created while at Stanford University with his best friend, a man who is also incredibly rich, Larry Page.

They've been described as quite private, quite enigmatic, but Sergei is also somewhat of a playboy.

He loves partying at a festival called Burning Man, which is very famous for attracting tech entrepreneurs.

Yeah, they've really shaped the way we consume stuff on the internet.

In many ways, it's not only a search engine, it's the biggest shop window in the world.

And advertisers make a lot of money from that.

Yeah, and they make a lot of money from the advertisers.

And we'll try and figure out how they do that later in the program.

First of all, let's hear a little clip with Sergei back in 2003.

This is just as Google was becoming a household name.

Let's listen to him.

One thing we decided early on is that

instead of having very flashy advertising, pop-ups,

things that blink, fly around, pop out of the screen and hit you on the nose.

Instead of doing all those things,

we don't want to distract the user.

Instead, we want to show them something they care about right at the time.

And that's interesting because to this day, the Google front page, the search page, is still pretty simple.

Because I remember when I was working in financial services, there was this guy who'd come in who was a kind of programmer, and he was the first person I'd ever seen put the Google up.

And I walked by his desk and I said, what's Google?

And he couldn't believe that I hadn't seen seen it.

Because in those days, it was things like Ulta Vista and Yahoo and what have you.

Ask Jeeves, Ask Jeeves.

But Google started out and then became totally dominant.

And also, somewhat unusually for tech founders and for many of our billionaires, actually, both Sergei and Larry actually stepped away from Google when it was at the height of its power.

And we will find out why they did that.

But first, let's wind right back to the very beginning of the story and figure out how Sergei Brin goes from zero to a million.

Sergei Mihailovich Brin was born in 1973 in the Soviet Union.

To a very smart, actually intellectual family, Sergei's granddad was a PhD mathematician.

His parents were academics, and they were actually better off than many other people under the regime.

But they still lived in a three-room apartment in central Moscow, which they shared with Sergei's grandmother.

They were also Jewish and they faced anti-Semitism under the communist regime because Jews were excluded from lots of positions.

So that meant that Sergei's dad's ambition of being an astrophysicist was not going to happen.

And not for the first time among our billionaires thing that the parents decided that the prospects of the kids were really important.

So they made some big decisions to give Sergei the best opportunities in life.

His mother actually said that when they decided to leave the USSR, this was a decision that was quote, 80 to 20 about Sergei.

So in 1979, you've got to remember, the Cold War was still in full swing at this time.

Six-year-old Sergei, with his parents, emigrated to the United States and they settled on the East Coast.

And once they were in the States, Sergei's dad became a professor of maths at the University of Maryland and his mother actually started working for NASA as a computer engineer.

So all in all, a very gifted family.

A pretty smart pedigree there.

Apparently, school in the US was initially difficult for Sergei, who struggled to speak English, but he was great at maths games and puzzles and he went to some Montessori school which prioritises independence and creativity and soon people recognized they had a maths prodigy on their hands.

And when Sergei was 16 in 1990, his dad actually took him and a group of other similarly gifted high school maths students on this exchange program to the Soviet Union and this was around the time in the 90s where the Soviet Union was not in a good shape.

Yeah, well it was changing wasn't it?

You just had the Berlin Wall come down in 1989 so things were in flux but apparently that trip awakened a defiance against authority in a 16 year old Sergei.

Apparently he threw pebbles at a Soviet police car.

His parents had to calm down the angered officers.

And Sergei has said, my rebelliousness came out of being born in Moscow.

This is something that followed me into adulthood.

So he graduated from the University of Maryland with a degree in computer science and mathematics.

At a young age, he was only, I think, 19, two years younger than most because he's gone so fast through his studies and headed for that Mecca, the temple of tech, which is Silicon Valley.

Yes, and he headed west for a PhD in computer science at Stanford, which obviously is the kind of almost incubator, feeder source.

The wellspring of tech talent.

Of so many billionaires that we've talked about.

And his Stanford advisors describe, one of them described him as a brash young man, but he was so smart, it just oozed out of him.

I wish someone would say that about me one day.

I'd love someone to say that about me.

There's still time, there's still time.

I think that shit may have sailed.

Anyway, his focus whilst at Stanford was on data mining, and that means extracting sort of patterns from big quantities of data.

and he published more than a dozen papers in academic journals so he's a proper academic at this stage.

And interestingly he could have kind of stayed there but there's clearly something in his personality that was chafing and asking for more so when a copy of his first ever resume emerged he'd actually hidden a secret message within the document's HTML code which you can kind of think of as his career objective and it said objective a large office good pay and very little work frequent expense accounts trips to exotic lands would be a plus you are not going to get there as a professor.

No, I guess not.

And also he was very much an outdoorsy kind of person.

He enjoyed the delights of California, sailing, scuba diving, rollerblading.

So not the kind of nerd that we came across with, for example, a Bill Gates or someone like that.

No.

In his second year at Stanford, he was giving a tour to prospective students and met someone, as we've had with lots of our billionaires, a person that would change their life, change both their lives.

So Larry Page was a computer science student from the University of Michigan.

and apparently they took an instant disliking to each other because unlike Sergei Larry was a classic introvert whereas Larry described Sergei as social.

He likes meeting people.

I thought he was pretty obnoxious.

He had really strong opinions about things and I guess I did too.

So really a kind of classic odd couple.

Yeah, like a Mick Jagger Keith Richards kind of thing.

But nevertheless, they recognised in each other their intellectual equal.

And Larry was also the son of computer science academics.

He was also Jewish and he'd also attended a Montessori school so there's much more they've got in common than that keeps them apart.

Larry joined Stanford with his PhD a few months later and him and Sergei became classmates and friends but they weren't actually working together yet.

So there's something had just happened which was going to be pivotal.

Of course the World Wide Web, the internet, had really just become known to the public a couple of years earlier and Larry set about researching how it worked and how web pages were linked back to.

And what he noticed was the linking was actually a bit like how academics work.

Yeah, so if you went to university and you ever had to do a page of citations, you'll know that academic papers are judged not only on what you talk about and how original you are, but on the number of papers that you cite and the number of papers that eventually cite them back and the perceived value of each citation.

So if you've got a really top-tier scientific journal citing you, it means that you're a legit academic journal.

Yeah, you've got clout in the academic world.

So what Larry realized is that if they could work out the number of these links back to a web page, that could function almost like academic citation.

That could tell you how important that link would be.

And therefore, as he put it, the web would become a much more valuable place.

This would require a really, really complicated algorithm.

And when the maths got very complicated, Sergei's particular math skills became really valuable to that, even though Larry was taking the lead on the project.

And Sergei said at the time, this is interesting to listen to what he said, he said, basically we convert the entire web into a big equation with several hundred million variables, which are the page ranks of all the web pages, and billions of terms, which are the links, and we just solve that equation.

Sounds simple, but it

horrendously complicated Boolean mathematics, I think, understand.

So Sergei and Larry filled Larry's dorm room with all these cheap computers.

They made it into an office and they built.

this new kind of search engine, which was at the time far better than any other that existed.

And that was because they actually decided to try and rank it and predict what you would find most helpful.

That was kind of a new thing.

So this search engine was clearly pretty advanced for its time.

And they shopped it around to a bunch of companies and asked for $1 million.

But surprisingly, it didn't really get any takers.

Yeah, because people were betting at that time, these kind of all-in-one web portals like Yahoo!

And they would try and curate the information for you.

Rather than you going in to find what you wanted, they would say, here's some stuff we think you'll find useful and interesting.

It was a kind of like front page, if you like.

I actually went and looked up an old AOL homepage and I was shocked by how different it looked.

Like it had, you know, news stories and classifieds and email, you know, like a one-stop shop.

And I was like, wow, I can't believe the internet used to look like this.

Yeah, it was like an enormous big newspaper in many ways.

When you think of it that way, no wonder these companies weren't interested, right?

But Larry and Sergei were still convinced that this was going to be a goer.

So they actually paused their work at Stanford, their studies at Stanford, and they started to build the company themselves.

Classic billionaire behavior.

Drop out of school for a bit.

I'll build a company myself because it doesn't exist yet.

So their professor introduced them to a Silicon Valley investor who wrote them an initial check for $100,000 and they went to party immediately.

Yeah, they immediately went to Burning Man.

Now Burning Man, if you haven't heard of it before, is an epic music festival in the Nevada desert which attracts a lot of tech billionaires.

Yeah, it's seen as an almost semi-religious pilgrimage.

Yeah, you're also not allowed to use any cash on site, so you can't buy anything, you have to barter.

And it really is this kind of almost tech utopian idea of a society that can just function on its own because everyone just gets along.

And in 1998, they named their new company Google after the term for a very large number.

The actual number is spelt G-O-O-G-O-L.

It's Google, which is a one followed by a hundred zeros to reflect the kind of huge amount of information available on the internet.

But when they registered the company, folklore has it that the person just spelt it wrong when they were registering the company and it stuck.

I mean, I did not want to think of a word in which we had to say Google it.

It doesn't work as a verb as well, does it?

Who knows how important a little detail that was?

So in typical Silicon Valley style, once they set up Google and not Google, they worked out of a garage, even though, you know, some people who initially worked there said this is just, again, folklore.

They actually worked in the house attached to the garage.

But interesting how these kind of stereotypes and cliches just ultimately attached themselves to successful tech companies.

They apparently threw rocking parties.

The house had a hot tub, so I'm getting sort of social network vibes when they were all sitting around drinking whilst they were coding and the revenge of the nerds having a great time.

Although, as we've heard, Sergei is no nerd.

So the house or garage, whatever they were calling it, was actually owned by an early employee of Google who had a sister, a woman called Anne Wojski.

And Sergei and Anne actually became a couple and they later married in 2007.

Meantime, they were raising more money.

And here's an interesting rendezvous of two of our billionaires because one of the first investors was actually Jeff Bezos and the funding round was closed but Bezos was so impressed he was determined to invest he gave them a million dollars.

I mean it's funny how many of our billionaires coincide and just collide into each other's lives.

It's like the billionaire cinematic universe you know like Marvel.

They're all in each other's pockets all the time.

In June 1999 Google released its first press release announcing it had raised $25 million from two venture capital firms, a company called Kleiner Perkins and the very famous Sequoia Capital, which whose fingerprints are all over some of these early tech companies.

And Google starts spending the money.

They move into offices in Palo Alto, California, which is also home to Microsoft and Apple, soon to be joined in the same place by Facebook and Tesla.

So Palo Alto, the home of Silicon Valley.

Yeah, and the Google office is kind of like a myth in its own right.

It became a thing.

It was your office like Google's, you know, lava lamps, table tennis, foosball, bouncy chairs.

I remember joking when we came into this building, they had some big orange balls around.

I said, oh, look, they're trying to pretend that we work at Google.

I mean, until the head of the BBC has a slide out of their office, like the CEO of Google did at one point, I don't think we can lay a claim to being anything like it.

I think there are times when the Director General of the BBC would have quite liked a slide out of the corner of his office.

I'm

anyway.

Let's move on before I get fired.

The co-founder of Twitter actually described the Google office as being like Willy Wonka's chocolate factory.

But there was a serious element to it.

The press release stated that Google's mission is to organize the world's information, making it universally accessible and useful.

I have to say, as mission statements go, that's a pretty good one.

Yes, I reckon mission accomplished, I would have to say, if we're looking back at that from now.

But also, they wanted to put an ethical dimension into their mission statement.

So this has become a very, very controversial claim they made.

Yes, so the company's motto informally became don't be evil, which was actually written into Google's code of conduct later on.

Yeah, they said they would try to define precisely what it meant to be a force for good, always do the right ethical thing.

And they said, ultimately, don't be evil seemed to be the easiest way to summarize it.

We'll examine whether they succeeded in that.

Well, I mean, that's what Sergei himself said.

But after that first round of funding of $25 million, it is safe to say that Sergei Don't Be Evil Bryn has officially become a millionaire.

He's made it to the million.

How then do we go from a million to a billion?

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So the key to Sergei's billions and Google's success is advertising.

Very old school, but Google put a new spin on it.

Yeah, the monetizing of Google was one of the great business case studies because there was a lot of people who were thinking, this is great, it's really useful and whatever.

How is it ever going to make money?

So one of the big things about Google is that every time you search for something, you are sending that information to Google, who can then see what everyone else is searching for in real time.

So for instance, one day the search logs showed that loads of people were searching Carol Brady maiden name.

It's gone straight to the top of the search charts.

She's actually a character from a 70s sitcom called The Brady Bunch, in case you didn't know.

But the reason for this strange, unexpected trend was because it had been the million-dollar question on who wants to be a millionaire that night.

And so Sergei was astonished at the sort of precision of this and what they could pick up.

He said, it was a good quote this.

It was like trying an electron microscope for the first time.

It was like a moment by moment barometer.

Now that is pretty valuable especially if you're an advertiser because what it does is it it flags public trends what people want what people want to know what they desire before anybody else has any other clue about what's going on so you don't need to rely on a magazine or you know an influencer or politician to tell you what's up you just look at Google yeah and remember we talked about how Google ranked stuff by relevance and authority but they launched a product which meant that you could slightly fiddle the system and pay to have your answer, your firm, your company, your product, pushed up the charts for relevance and authority.

So that's called AdWords.

And that is still to this day the engine room of Google's astonishing profitability.

And that was launched, well, almost 24 years ago in 2000.

Interestingly, Sergei and Larry had actually initially both been against the idea of advertising in the first place, because when they first presented this search engine at Stanford, they noted that any advertiser-funded search engine would become, quote, inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.

Very interesting.

Yeah, but there was pressure from investors, understandably, to make money, generate revenue, and so they relented on that.

But they did do advertising their way.

So they kept the ads as text only.

So it wasn't kind of two in your face.

So you still felt that you were in control in a way.

Just like what Sergei was mentioning in that clip that we listened to.

No pop-ups, no flashing lights or images.

Yeah.

And even though at this stage, like any company of this age, it was losing money, they turned down $3 million offered by Visa to display an ad on the site's homepage.

So they're really putting their money where their mouth is, or their lack of money where their mouth is at this point.

And, you know, they hung in there.

They stuck to their guns.

I mean, it seems really obvious now that this is how you make money as a search engine.

But at the time, it just wasn't a sure thing.

You know, the year they launched AdWords in 2000, Google had just 25% of the search market because the other search engines were still enormously popular.

Yeah, but anyone who doubted Google were proved wrong.

Over the next few years, the company grew massively.

By 2003, it was named the fastest growing tech company in North America.

And then we hit this classic billionaire turning point where they are offered a huge sum of money and they turn it down in the form of Yahoo.

So Yahoo actually tried to buy Google for $3 billion.

Just remember, three years earlier, they couldn't sell it for a million.

Sergei and Larry turned the billions down.

Yeah, they weren't going to sell up now that is an absolutely crucial point I'd like to think that I could take the long view and you know I'm going to be a multi a centi billionaire I'm going to have a hundred billion dollars one day if I stick to my guns turning down three billion dollars when you're in your 20s I'm afraid I'm sorry I'm out it takes a lot of guts to stick around especially when at the time Yahoo was huge yeah compared to Google yeah and so the next step for companies like this is to go public have an initial public offering a sale of their shares, because what that means is that in future you can sell more shares in the company, you can raise more money.

So going public is a big deal.

Sergey and Larry were reluctant because they thought that once you start selling off stakes in the company you start potentially to lose control but they had an answer to this.

Once again, we talk about the billionaire cinematic universe.

Sergey and Larry actually encounter another one of our billionaires, a guy called Warren Buffett, who actually changed their minds on this idea of going public.

So he explained that his company, Berkshire Hathaway, had a two-tier stock structure and he used that to retain control over his company.

Yeah, so basically, every share that Warren Buffett had, he had one vote for, which he would keep.

Every share he sold to anyone else would have one ten-thousandth of a vote.

So even though he didn't own most of the company in financial terms, in terms of voting rights and control, he still retained control.

And this is what Sergei and Larry did.

But before they could go public, they needed a CEO because their investors said they needed a grown-up in the room, you know, someone to reassure Wall Street.

The other term sometimes they use for this is a greybeard.

Just impose a bit of discipline because being a public company sometimes requires a bit of discipline, otherwise, these crazy founders can get themselves in hot water, as Elon Musk has found out over the years.

So no more hot tubs in the garage, or maybe the greybeard said that was okay.

So they rejected several candidates to be the chief executive, the grown-up in the room.

Finally, they agreed on this tech veteran called Eric Schmidt.

So Sergei became the president of technology.

Larry became president of products.

But to retain some control over Google, they also copied another classic Warren Buffett tactic.

They set out their philosophy in a letter and it was called an owner's manual for Google shareholders.

And this is absolutely key, this, because one of the things about going public is that you then have to issue quarterly earnings.

You've got investors who are impatient and want to see you hit targets.

And sometimes when you're building a business, you can't do that.

You've got to take tough decisions.

So it's one of the big issues that to this day dominates a lot of conversation, saying being privately owned means you can actually call the shots, take a longer term decision.

You don't have to satisfy an impatient Wall Street.

And so they said, as a private company, we've concentrated on the long term and this has served us well.

As a public company, we will do the same.

In our opinion, outside pressures too often tempt companies to sacrifice long-term opportunities to meet quarterly market expectations.

So we're going to be public, but we're going to act like we're private.

We're going to do it our way.

So in 2004, Google makes an initial public offering and raises over $1.9 billion,

which means that the market value of the company skyrocketed to $23 billion.

And this was an important moment for technology because just remember the dot-com crash had happened just a couple of years ago.

So this was the tech lion roaring again.

People said, oh, here's a company which is fast growing.

There's investor appetite for it.

The show is back on the road.

Yep, the comeback hid of the tech boom.

Yeah.

In sheer financial terms, the IPO and the valuation of the company at 23 billion means that his stake is worth $3.8 billion.

So at age 31,

Sergei Brin is officially a billionaire.

Oh my God.

There's something so horrible about seeing that age there when you're in your 30s.

You're like, what have I done with my life?

So at age 31, he's officially a billionaire.

I think I'm going on holiday for the rest of my life at this point, but they're not done yet.

And as we know, Google has got a long way to go.

This is 20 years ago that he became a billionaire.

So there's much more to this story yet.

So as part of this commitment to long-term thinking outlined in their philosophy, Sergei and Larry promised that they'll stay at Google for 20 years.

So Sergei is now president of technology, and the 2000s is all about extending what Google can offer to the world.

So for instance, Google Images was launched in 2001 after Google noticed the demand in pictures after Jennifer Lopez wore that famously plunging green Versace dress to the Grammys.

Yeah and another a bunch of other products came along in the Google stable.

We had Gmail that launched in 2004.

Google Maps, Google Earth, Google Docs, Google Spreadsheets, all of these things came thick and fast in the noughties.

So these all became products that people interacted with on a daily basis.

And to be honest, it's kind of hard to think of a time before any of them.

And Google became basically a household name.

Yeah, I mean, as a journalist, where would we be without Google?

I have to say, I remember talking to some old journalist colleagues here who said in the old days you used to have a cuttings library and someone would literally cut things out of newspapers and put them with clothes pegs on clotheslines and then you would say can you bring me the cuttings on this story from five or ten years ago and they would literally give you little yellowing bits of paper.

Imagine trying to do our job without Google these days.

I mean when you described that I genuinely felt like I was listening to someone from like the medieval medieval past describing how monasteries used to work.

That is comparatively not that long ago.

But Google, of course, was so ubiquitous, in fact, it becomes a verb.

In 2006, the Oxford English Dictionary added the verb to Google.

Now, you might think that this is just a smooth trajectory, but not every single idea was a winner.

So an early Google employee claimed that Sergei would often just throw out what sounds like random marketing ideas.

They said he wanted to project our logo on the moon.

He wanted to take the entire entire marketing budget and use it to help Chechnyan refugees.

That's that anti-Soviet thing again there, rearing its head.

He wanted to make Google-branded condoms that we would give out at high schools.

There were a lot of ideas floated.

Most of them never became full-fledged projects.

But if Larry and Sergei suggested something, you pretty much had to take it at face value for a while.

But there may have been flops, but on the whole, enough ideas worked.

And by 2005, Google crossed the milestone of being worth $100 billion.

And then in 2006, Google made what is a huge move.

It actually bought YouTube.

It paid $1.65 billion in Google stock and it actually beat out Microsoft, Yahoo, and News Corp, Rupert Murdoch's company, proving itself to be the internet's dominant player.

So it owns so much real estate on the web now.

Yeah, you've got a lot of eyeballs a lot of the time.

Sergei, meanwhile, is in his 30s.

He's enjoying his billionaire lifestyle.

In 2007, the Wall Street Journal actually found some great details about Google's new, quote, unusually large private jet, which is a Boeing 767, which usually carries about 180 people.

It's three times heavier than your average executive private jet.

And according to the plane's designer, they had some odd requests.

They wanted hammocks hung from the ceiling.

That's not good news.

In turbulence, I'd like to see a video of that.

No, I think perhaps this was vetoed, along with maybe, well, apparently Sergei demanded a California king-size bed, which prompted the CEO Eric Schmidt to step in.

So the greybeard tried to intervene when Sergei and Larry got into a fight over this bed.

And he said, Sergei, you can have whatever bed you want in your room.

Larry, you can have whatever kind of bed you want in your bedroom.

Let's just move on.

So dad's in the room telling the two kids to stop

typed down.

But more seriously, Google's first executive chef called Sergei a playboy.

And he alleged that Sergei was known for getting his fingers caught in the cookie jar with employees that work for the company in the Masseurs room.

And he also said that HR had told him that Sergei's response to it was, why not?

They're my employees.

So these are excerpts which were published in Vanity Fair from an oral history book called Valley of Genius, the Uncensored History of Silicon Valley.

Now, important to state that a spokesperson for Google has declined to comment to Vanity Fair's request about these allegations.

Yeah, so we'll just leave that there.

For the last 10 years, he's been head of technology.

Sergei then begins a new role heading up the secret of Google X.

This was known as the Moonshot Factory.

Now, if you don't know what a moonshot means, it's basically something where you just aim for the moon.

So these are basically

ambitious.

Wildly ambitious, forward-thinking, futuristic stuff, self-driving cars, Google Glass, which, you know, was kind of a flop, you know, these smart glasses.

People were made a lot of fun of them when they came out.

It's like he thought of himself a bit like sort of Tony Stark from Iron Man.

But those dreams were dampened.

In 2014, news leaked of an alleged extramarital affair with an employee on the Google Glass team.

It actually led to a divorce from his wife Anne, who was by now the mother of two kids.

She's also the founder of the genomics company 23andMe.

And it was even reported that it came between the two founders.

Larry apparently stopped talking to Sergei for some time because of the affair and its fallout.

But in 2015, Google announced a corporate restructure, and this led to the creation of this umbrella company called Alphabet Inc.

Yeah, and this is interesting because I remember this covering this at the time and the thinking was that Google has become so so big that it was a sprawling becoming a sprawling empire and what they wanted to do was have an umbrella company and then keep a kind of entrepreneurial spirit within the different units these little divisions can still keep some of that kind of hunger ambition innovation without becoming some sprawling big thing like ibm did in the 1980s or something it's also interesting because it also resembles what happened with lvmh right one of our other billionaires bernard arnaud keeps all these individual luxury brands operating as separate companies underneath the LVMH umbrella.

But it's interesting, so at this point, they bring in a new chief executive, a guy called Sundar Peshai.

Larry becomes chief executive of Alphabet, and Sergei is made president.

So in a way, the tectonic plates in the company are shifting a little bit here.

You could argue whether they're becoming more powerful or less powerful.

I would say they're becoming more kind of elder statesmen of this incredible thing that they've built.

Right, they're kind of at the top of the chain, surveying everything, but probably don't know exactly what's going on at every single company.

So then in 2019, 20 years after they started out, now both 46, Sergei and Larry announced they were stepping down from their roles and day-to-day management of Alphabet.

They said they would assume, this is the way they put it, assume the role of proud parents offering advice and love but not daily nagging.

Crucially, however, they still retained 51% of voting rights on Alphabet's board.

So they could override that CEO if needed, although so far they've kind of stuck to their word, they've kept out of it.

And them leaving didn't seem to harm the company's prospects any.

In 2020, Alphabet became the fourth U.S.

company to be worth a trillion dollars behind Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon.

I don't even know how many zeros a trillion has.

It is 12.

Can I get back to you on that one?

Yes, yes.

We'll Google it.

So what's been happening since then?

What's Sergey been up to since stepping back from the company he founded?

So he remarried in 2018.

They had a daughter.

But in 2022, the Wall Street Journal alleged that his wife, Nicole shanahan had an affair with elon musk uh musk and a lawyer for nicole denied the affair sergey remained silent but sergey and nicole did then divorce and post divorce he was seen partying topless wear at burning man his favourite

but he's now a centi billionaire so 100 billion

a hundred billion dollars interestingly though getting more money doesn't actually seem to be his number one priority so he spends quite a lot of his time and money on what you could describe as passion projects yeah Yeah, he backed a company which was developing 400-foot zeppelins, airships, if you like, which would be zero emission.

And apparently, he's already sunk $250 million into that so far, which sounds like a lot of money, but a small change to someone like Sergei.

One of his associates said Bryn follows things as far as he can possibly go to an ultimate conclusion, and that's not necessarily driven by business.

It's a curiosity.

So that's kind of it.

He's kind of a dilettante, actually.

Yeah, well, I mean, you know, if you've got that much money, it's like being a kind of Victorian industrialist.

Your factory in the north is making loads of money.

In this case, that factory is Google.

And you are free to go off and pursue whatever the hell you like.

And a lot of those Victorians went off to, you know, become amateur scientists.

It feels like it's a bit the same.

But he is still not totally done with Google because in 2023, Google invited Sergei and Larry back to help with their AI product strategy because CEO Sunda Peshai had declared a code read following the release of ChatGPT, which is not owned by Google.

Yeah, that is owned by something called OpenAI in which Microsoft has a big stake.

And this is actually the battle that is being fought right now.

Because ChatGPT, as many people will know, if you haven't used it, it's basically like a search engine but intelligent.

You can ask it anything you want and it will give you, it'll feel like a human being coming back to talk to you.

Now that is the one thing that could possibly loosen Google's total stranglehold on search.

This is actually the first genuine threat in the last 20 years.

And we'll be covering the boss of the company that makes ChatGPT, which is OpenAI.

His name is Sam Altman later in the series.

Interestingly, some people think that AI was the goal for Google from its very conception.

So a founding editor, a technology magazine called Wired, actually met them at the very beginning of Google's journey and said that the mission for Google was not to use AI to make their search better, but to use search to make an AI.

And actually, we've got a clip of Larry from that same 2003 interview with the BBC where he talks about Google's desire for an AI-like search engine.

So let's listen to that.

The ultimate search engine, which is something we talk about, would understand everything in the world.

It would understand exactly what you wanted, and it would give you that thing.

Google is pretty good, but it's nowhere near that good.

It requires being smart, like a person is smart.

And so if you had a search engine that could answer any question,

then it would be

very, very smart.

And so that's a hard thing.

But if you were able to do it would obviously be a very big deal.

I think we have people at Google who work on doing that

and you know they're reasonably excited about it and think it might happen in their sort of work life

but they don't know that it will happen in that time.

Wow, that's quite prophetic, isn't it?

That was in 2003.

That's exactly where we are right now, 21 years later.

So in the work life of the people he was talking about there.

In fact, as we're recording this, Google has just launched an AI-generated summarized search results that sort of sit above the normal links.

And there's Google have sort of selling this as doing the Googling for you.

Now, unfortunately, it's not performed very well and has gone viral recently for delivering a lot of very bad answers, such as Google's AI search results have told people that you can put glue on pizza.

Really?

I hadn't caught that one.

I'll hold the glue on mine.

And commentators, I mean, basically, AI threatens or promises to be the next revolution of how the internet works.

So there's a lot to play for here.

Google has dominated over the last 20 years.

I think it's worth also saying at this point that Google's not been without controversy.

I want to go back to that thing that was in their mission statement, don't be evil.

Because some people would say its dominance is such that it has squashed competition.

And in fact, Google has been in court both in the US and in Europe and elsewhere for abusing its dominant market position and it's been fined billions of dollars.

And in fact, in May of this year, there were final arguments being heard in this massive case, United States versus Google, over whether Google broke federal antitrust laws, competition laws, to maintain its online search dominance.

So the case alleges that Google, whose search engine now controls nearly 90% of all online queries, paid billions to maintain this monopoly over the search market.

Yeah, for example, agreements with other tech rivals, or for example, making sure that your smartphone is powered by Google.

Google's defense is that they dominate because they are the best and competition is just, in their words, one click away.

And the ruling is expected to come at the end of 2024.

So stay tuned for that.

And also its relationship with China is very interesting.

For example, to do business in China, obviously the most populous country in the world at that time, Google agreed to comply with the Chinese government's censorship requirements, which would block websites extolling democracy.

For example, any reference to the 1989 demonstrations in Tiananmen Square, that was blocked.

And so they had to make an ethical sacrifice if they wanted to get into that market.

And some people say that was a step too far.

And you know, like even within one single industry, like for instance, journalism or digital journalism, there's a huge argument to be made that Google has actually sucked advertising away from traditional publishers through AdWords.

So essentially, some people are even thinking that, you know, maybe Google is responsible for the kind of declining fortunes of independent journalism because publishers can no longer make money from advertising in the same way because Google is sucking up all that revenue.

Yeah, and a lot of people also blame them for the demise of local journalism, newspapers.

One of the big things that local papers used to do was their classified advertising would often pay for a lot of that.

That's kind of gone because you can search for dry cleaner near me.

I mean, the internet generally and Google in particular have done that.

I mean, I don't even want to think about how Google has affected the fortunes of the people who print map books.

Yeah, I know.

But I have to say that Google Maps has got to go down in my book, as one of the most useful things ever invented.

I wouldn't want to be a pizza delivery person in a pre-Google world.

I mean, that's when you had to go to the pizza place and pick it up yourself.

Yeah, exactly.

So, the issues about Google rumble on.

Sergei, along with his friend Larry, Sergei created an incredibly useful monster.

So, while we're debating these things, it seems like a good moment to finally judge Sergei Brin.

Is he good, bad, or just another billionaire?

I'm going to score each of these categories out of 10.

First category, wealth.

So he's currently worth $135 billion.

That's around number seven or eight in the world today.

So he's very, very rich.

And funnily enough, he's just behind Larry.

I don't know how that happened.

Maybe it's because he spent all his money on 400-foot airships.

Yeah, the California kingbeds kind of rack up the costs.

And Burning Man's not cheap, you know, so he's probably spent a little money there.

So, I mean, wealth, he's top 10.

He's in the Premier League, right?

Got to give him a nine, I think.

Yeah, Yeah, I think a 9 out of 10, pretty much.

I mean, we've had some centi-billionaires on this show, but not many.

Larry and Sergei are definitely up there.

Okay.

Rags to Riches is how far have they come in their journey to being a multi-billionaire?

So when his family arrived in the US, they said they'd never seen so much meat in the supermarkets.

Remember, they came from the former Soviet Union?

I think this is a really good Rags to Riches story, actually.

He didn't grow up literally dirt poor like Oprah, but coming from the restrictions of the Soviet Union to America, you know, it really is a coming to America story, isn't it?

It is a coming to America story.

But bear in mind, they came bearing great intellectual and educational gifts.

It's not like they started from the bottom in the office room.

They were, you know, math geniuses.

So they've got a culture of high achievement.

And obviously that was able to thrive more in the U.S.

than it was in the Soviet Union.

Nevertheless, to go from former Soviet Union not knowing much English to being one of the top 10 richest people on the planet, I'm going to give him a 8.

Yeah, I'm going to give him an 8 because it is a great story.

You can imagine young Sergei in his first Walmart staring at all the meat on display.

I mean, it is a great image.

Villainy is another category.

What have they done to people along the way?

Have they done people over?

Have they made some ruthless moves?

Have they, in short, managed to fulfil their motto, don't be evil?

I mean, other than those allegations around

workplace relationships, strangely, I think Sergei has not really fallen out with very many people.

You know, even when he fell out with Larry after that alleged extramarito affair, they clearly still work together and still like each other.

Yeah, I think this is a more nuanced one in a way, because they

knew that their advertising model would prioritise the needs of advertisers over the needs of users, but they had to make some money, so they did that.

So that, if you could argue, that's compromise number one.

And then going to China agreeing to

effectively censor

yeah they agreed to be censored in order to get to that market and there is no doubt that Google's dominance has squashed competition in other places so I think this is not black and white this one I think there's some gray areas on the other hand they've invented one of the most useful things on the planet which we all use on a daily basis if it wasn't so good we it wouldn't be so dominant so I'm gonna give them a five on this one just straight down the middle Straight down the middle, yeah.

I mean, it's funny, right?

Because if Sergei and Larry had not invented Google, would someone else have invented it?

Would some whiz at Alta Vista or Ask Geez or Yahoo have come up with their version of Google?

I think for me, villainy, yeah, I'm going to agree with you.

I just want to go straight down the middle, five out of ten, because you can't agree on everything, can you?

Yeah, okay, well, let's look at the next one because this is interesting.

Philanthropy.

How much has Sergei contributed back to the world?

Now, the Sergei Brin Family Foundation supports his favorite causes.

This also includes a non-profit dedicated to colonizing the moon.

So

those billionaires, man, honestly, those billionaires.

What is it with their moon and Mars and spaceships and what have you?

In terms of amounts, let's look at the numbers.

In 2021, he made $240 million worth of charitable payments, considerably more than his old friend Larry.

He's also donated hundreds of millions to the Michael J.

Fox Foundation, which researches Parkinson's disease.

His mother was diagnosed with it.

So the numbers look big, but Forbes estimate he's actually only given away between one to five percent of his wealth.

That's not a lot.

It's not a lot.

For me, he scores really badly on this.

You think so?

If it is five percent, five percent of a hundred billion is five billion.

I mean, that's a lot of money.

Yeah, but then, you know, like compared to the overall amount of money that he has, and also the fact that some of these charities are to literally colonize the moon.

I'm sorry, but we've got problems on Earth as it is already.

You know, don't spend money colonizing the moon.

Okay, sounds like you're lowballing this one.

I'm lowballing it.

I'm giving it a one out of ten.

One?

Yeah, I mean,

man gives away $5 billion and you give him a one.

I'm going to give him a two, so we're going to disagree.

We'll disagree on that.

Power.

Boy, I mean, the Google algorithm, I would say, is one of the most powerful things in the world.

Oh, yeah, definitely.

This one scores for me really highly.

I would maybe give it even a 10.

A 10?

We have a 10 in the house.

Well, when you think about it, if Sergei emailed whoever's in charge of making the Google algorithm tweaks and said, hey, I want you to make this person disappear from the internet, that could be done.

That could actually honestly be done.

And that's an enormous amount of power for one person to have.

Yeah, that is kind of, that is huge.

You're right.

I hadn't thought of it in those terms.

I would say that their power over Google, at the height of their powers, when they were in charge, they and they still earn 51%,

they would have easily as much power as a Rupert Murdoch.

And I think we gave gave Rupert Murdoch 10?

Yes.

So they're right up there.

It's a 10.

A 10 for power, one of the very rare tens that we've had in the show.

Now, what about legacy?

When Sergey Brin goes off to the moon and we never see him again, what is his legacy going to be?

I think that we will never, ever approach information in the same way ever again.

And I think it's Sergei's father who said, Google has saved more time for more people than anything else in the world.

I can't disagree with that.

I almost feel like that's lowballing it because he makes it sound like a microwave or a dishwasher.

I think what Google has done is effectively be the next Gutenberg, basically.

You know, the guy who invented modern printing and revolutionized everything.

I think that's what Google has done for this world.

And the fact that a Google-powered search engine is on my phone, through this thing in my pocket, I can basically tap into all human knowledge ever generated on the planet.

So I think a legacy, I'm going to have to give him another 10.

I think it's going to be another 10.

I can't think of another product that we've discussed on the show.

Not from the internet itself.

Yes.

But they are.

Which was a joint effort, really.

Yeah, yeah.

But

this is the way that you put a saddle on the internet and sort of ride it wherever you want to go, isn't it?

This is the interface with it.

And given the fact that Google was founded by two Stanford students in a dorm room, that is an incredible journey.

Yeah.

Finally, good, bad, or just phenomenally rich.

Oh, I mean, Google is so useful.

Like we've discussed, it's changed everything.

That would not have existed without Sergey, and it wouldn't have existed without Larry to give Larry his due.

It messes stuff up, it's true, and it's made a lot of decisions that have...

impacted a lot of different industries, arguably for the worst.

Yeah.

But then innovation always does that.

You know, the railroad gets rid of the horses.

The printing press got rid of illuminated manuscripts.

Exactly.

You know, new industries come up and kill off old ones.

That's the way of the world.

So I'm going to say, oh

I'm not gonna say either I'm gonna say he's just another billionaire because there's some bad and some good in there and it is an inevitable function of the way they've changed the world they will become fantastically rich so I'm gonna say just another billionaire oh I'm gonna disagree with you because I just think what Google has done is incredible I mean putting aside all the kind of controversies and the way that it has, you know, arguably in some cases destroyed entire industries, including maybe the industry that we work in journalism what it has done is completely changed the way people access information you know you could be if you have a smartphone and the internet and you live in the middle of nowhere and you've got reception you have basically access to all of human knowledge sometimes they mess up the rankings sometimes it's in hockey to advertise as sure but the very fact that they've managed to do that is astonishing and I think for that reason it's it's got to be good for me he's a good billionaire you've changed my mind you've changed my mind I've mounted the correct argument You have, I think, life is just a lot easier, a richer, more complex.

There's no excuse for living in ignorance anymore, right?

And that's got to be a good thing.

I'm going to go with you.

I'm going to change my mind.

Well done, Sergei.

You're a good billionaire.

So who have we got next week?

We've got the first lady of fashion herself.

The devil wears it?

It's the Prada founder herself, Mutia Prada.

Now, this is going to be a tricky one for me.

I know less about fashion than anyone else in the world.

Well lucky for you I am obsessed with fashion.

You're the best dressed podcaster I've ever seen.

So she must be one of the first billionaires, actually maybe the only billionaire we'll ever cover, who at one point wanted to be in mine.

Join us for the next episode where we talk about Mutia Prada.

This podcast was produced by Hannah Hufford.

James Cook is the editor and it's a BBC Studios production for BBC World Service.

For the BBC World Service, the senior podcast producer is Kat Collins and the podcast commissioning editor is John Minnell.

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