Ten Things You Didn’t Know about Google CEO Larry Page

Larry Page

Search giant Google is in the news every single day but this week three big things have been going on.  First is the TED talk from CEO Larry Page.  This biggest news to come out of it is that when asked who he’d leave his billions to he mentioned Elon Musk.  A pretty amazing endorsement for the founder of Tesla.   Second is Google Glass.   Recently they’ve partnered Ray Ban and Oakley to revamp their glasswear to have a sleeker and cooler look.  Lastly, they’re always making changes and tweaks to improve their search capabilities.  They recently announced that Waze data is going to be integrated with Google search to bring users live traffic updates.    However, we wanted to turn our attention to Google CEO Larry Page.  We did a little research and there are 10 things about the Co-Founder of one of the world’s biggest companies you might not know.

Larry Page’s Net Worth

Currently it’s estimated that Larry Page’s net worth is $31.2 Billion.  When you’re the co-founder of the world’s largest search engine and your stock has been skyrocketing since going public in 2004, it’s easy to see why there are so many dollar signs attached to your name.

Larry Page’s salary is only $1 per year

You read that right.  One dollar.  Actually this is quite common amongst some of the wealthiest CEO’s but ever since Google went public in 2004, both page and Co-Founder Sergey Brin have kept their salaries at the $1 a year price tag.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin conceived Google from a project called “Backrub”

After enrolling in a computer science Ph.D. program at Stanford University, Page was in search of a dissertation theme and considered exploring the mathematical properties of the World Wide Web, understanding its link structure as a huge graph.  His supervisor Terry Winograd encouraged him to pursue this idea, which Page later recalled as the best advice he ever got.  Page then focused on the problem of finding out which web pages link to a given page, considering the number and nature of such backlinks to be valuable information about that page, with the role of citations in academic publishing in mind.  In his research project, nicknamed “BackRub”, he was soon joined by Sergey Brin, a fellow Stanford Ph.D. student.

Larry was not always Google’s CEO

In fact Page didn’t take over the helm until 2011.  Eric Schmidt was originally hired by Brin and Page to be Google’s CEO.   Currently Schmidt is now one of the executive directors at Google.

Inventor at an early age

In an interview, Page recalled his childhood, noting that his house “was usually a mess, with computers and Popular Science magazines all over the place”. His attraction to computers started when he was six years old when he got to “play with the stuff lying around”. He became the “first kid in his elementary school to turn in an assignment from a word processor.” His older brother also taught him to take things apart and before long he was taking “everything in his house apart to see how it worked”. He said that “from a very early age, I also realized I wanted to invent things. So I became really interested in technology and business. Probably from when I was 12, I knew I was going to start a company eventually.”

Carl Page

His father Carl Page is considered to be a pioneer in computer science and artificial intelligence.

He is an investor in Tesla Motors

It’s no coincidence that Larry Page endorsed Elon Musk as the man he’d leave all his billions to.  Larry Page is an investor in Musk’s company Tesla Motors.  Page is big on promoting alternative energy projects and investments through Google’s philanthropic arm Google.org.

After Google got its first angel investment, Larry and Sergey went to Burger King for breakfast

Larry Page and Sergey Brin demoed their product for Andy Bechtolsheim. He took a brief look at it, and decided to give them a $100,000 check on the spot. They didn’t even have a bank account yet. He told them to deposit the check when they did. To celebrate they went to Burger King.  (Source: Sergey Brin and Larry Page: Founders of Google)

Larry Page once considered taking goats as payment

When Google was rolling out its ad system, it had to develop a payment infrastructure to accept money for ads. Not all countries take credit cards, so Larry Page suggested Google could take the local currency. In Uzbekistan, for instance, he suggested taking goats as a payment.

He hates golf

Google has never sponsored a golf event and apparently never will.
 (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Written by Worthly