It’s not just Washington. Even in Silicon Valley, people have started wondering: where’s Larry? Page has long been reclusive, a computer scientist who pondered technical problems away from the public eye, preferring to chase moonshots over magazine covers. Unlike founder-CEO peers (Mark Zuckerberg comes to mind), he hasn’t presented at product launches or on earnings calls since 2013, and he hasn’t done press since 2015. He leaves day-to-day decisions to Pichai and a handful of advisers. But a slew of interviews in recent months with colleagues and confidants, most of whom spoke on condition of anonymity because they were worried about retribution from Alphabet, describe Page as an executive who’s more withdrawn than ever, bordering on emeritus, invisible to wide swaths of the company. Supporters contend he’s still engaged, but his immersion in the technology solutions of tomorrow has distracted him from the problems Google faces today. “What I didn’t see in the last year was a strong central voice about how [Google’s] going to operate on these issues that are societal and less technical,” says a longtime executive who recently left the company.
The money quote – quite literally: “People who know him say he’s disappearing more frequently to his private, white-sand Caribbean island.”. With the numerous challenges Google is facing, it seems odd that Page is being so reclusive.
He is a multi billionaire. He can either engage and get all the stress and vilification that’s associated with that (ala musk and Zuckerberg) or sit back on his private island relaxing happily with drink in one hand and a kindle in the other. I know which I’d choose..
Except that he’s the CEO of ‎Alphabet Inc., a publicly traded company, so he has a fiduciary responsibility to Google’s shareholders.
There’s nothing wrong with disengaging from running Google and enjoying an early retirement, but he should probably step down from CEO if that’s what he wants.
Yeah, but running oneself into the ground isn’t a technique for fiduciary responsibility either.
If that’s what he wants to do then he should retire as CEO. The responsibility of the CEO is to actually run the company.
If the CEO has effectively delegated out all the tasks of his role then he’s doing a pretty great job of being CEO. You don’t have to be involved in the minutiae of running a business if you have people working for you who are handling things and are paid and trusted to do it for you.
Maybe he’s pondering the moral implications of the company’s technologies, and how far they have come from the days of “don’t be evil”.
(I don’t know if I’m being sarcastic or not.)
Some multi millionaires just don’t know when to quit. How about let somebody else be the CEO and run google and become rich? No no he needs another 0 to the end of his bank account. Greed is one of the worst problem we have these days.
“These days”?
The most honest and human thing I’ve ever heard out of Google.
What sort of white-sand-Caribbean-island owning maniac would prefer to spend his time thinking up new ways of running an unloved, over-mighty directory service?
I’m sure Google is big enough and ugly enough to scrape by short one of its legion of high-paid big-wigs.
Missed opportunity for the title.
It turns out that the missing Page is FrontPage news…
Everyone needs a reset. I don’t give my job away when I take time off to reset my views and thinking so I can come back refreshed. Sure he’s the CEO, but he’s not really the one running the company. Much like the president, he’s just a figurehead.