Who owns Google?
Quick answer
Google is owned by Alphabet Inc., a publicly traded company created in 2015 as Google’s parent. Alphabet is owned by its shareholders, but co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin hold special shares that give them control of most of the voting power. Sundar Pichai is CEO of both Google and Alphabet.
Key facts
- Parent company
- Alphabet Inc.
- Founded
- 1998, by Larry Page and Sergey Brin
- CEO
- Sundar Pichai (Google since 2015, Alphabet since 2019)
- Headquarters
- Mountain View, California
- Stock tickers
- GOOGL (Class A), GOOG (Class C)
How the ownership works
Alphabet has three classes of shares:
| Class | Ticker | Votes per share | Who holds it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Class A | GOOGL | 1 | Public investors |
| Class B | Not traded | 10 | Mostly Page, Brin and some insiders |
| Class C | GOOG | 0 | Public investors |
Because Class B shares carry 10 votes each, Page and Brin together control a majority of shareholder votes, even though they own a minority of the company’s total shares. Big investment firms such as Vanguard and BlackRock are among the largest holders of the public shares, mainly through index funds.
A short history
- 1996Page and Brin, PhD students at Stanford, build a search engine called BackRub
- 1998Google is founded in a garage in Menlo Park, California
- 2004Google goes public on the stock market
- 2006Google buys YouTube
- 2015Alphabet is created as the parent company; Sundar Pichai becomes Google’s CEO
- 2019Page and Brin step back from daily management; Pichai also becomes Alphabet’s CEO
What Alphabet owns
- Google: Search, Android, Chrome, Gmail, Maps, YouTube, Google Cloud and the Gemini AI models
- Waymo: self-driving cars
- Verily and Calico: health and life sciences
- Other experimental projects, sometimes called “Other Bets”
Can you own part of Google?
Yes. Anyone can buy Alphabet shares through a brokerage account. Prices move every day: see why the stock market goes down. This is general information, not financial advice.
Google competes with Microsoft Copilot and Anthropic in AI.
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