Alphabet Inc.

On October 2, 2015, Google ceased to be just a search company. That day, Larry Page and Sergey Brin completed a corporate restructuring that created Alphabet Inc., a holding company designed to separate Google's core businesses from its more experimental projects. Headquartered at the Googleplex in Mountain View, California, Alphabet now sits atop one of the world's most valuable portfolios: Google Search, YouTube, Android, Google Cloud, and a collection of ambitious bets like Waymo, Verily, and DeepMind.

The restructuring was announced two months earlier, on August 10, 2015. Page explained in a blog post that the new structure would make Google's core business "cleaner and more accountable" while giving other ventures the independence to grow. The name Alphabet was chosen to evoke a collection of companies, and the domain abc.xyz plays on the first three letters of the alphabet. Page served as Alphabet's first CEO, with Brin as President, until December 3, 2019, when they handed the reins to Sundar Pichai. Pichai had been running Google since 2015 and now leads both entities. Page and Brin remain board members and, through a special class of stock, control the majority of voting shares.

Alphabet's financial scale is staggering. For fiscal year 2024, it reported $339.9 billion in revenue and $87.7 billion in net income. The vast majority of that money comes from advertising, but Google Cloud is growing fast, and the company is pouring billions into AI infrastructure, $48 billion in capital expenditures in 2024 alone. In 2023, Alphabet merged Google Brain and DeepMind into a single unit called Google DeepMind, and in 2024 it launched Gemini, a multimodal AI model now integrated across Google products. Yet the company has also faced turbulence: a $7.5 million settlement over a Google+ data leak, antitrust lawsuits from the U.S. Department of Justice and the European Commission, and a 2023 layoff of 12,000 employees, many of whom lost account access before being notified. Despite these challenges, Alphabet's market capitalization sits around $2.5 trillion, placing it among the three most valuable companies on earth.[edit]