Larry Page

Lawrence Edward Page (born March 26, 1973) is an American businessman and computer scientist. Along with Sergey Brin, he co-founded Google. Page is a centibillionaire and consistently ranks among the world’s wealthiest individuals. In 2026, both the Bloomberg Billionaires Index and Forbes placed his net worth at $334.1 billion, making him the second-richest person on the planet.

Page served as Google’s chief executive officer from its founding in 1997 until August 2001, when Eric Schmidt took over. He returned to the CEO role in April 2011 and held it until July 2015, at which point he became CEO of Alphabet Inc., the newly created parent company. Page remained in that position until December 4, 2019, when he and Brin stepped down from all executive and day-to-day responsibilities. He continues to serve on Alphabet’s board, remains an employee, and is one of two controlling shareholders.

Page is the co-creator of PageRank, the search ranking algorithm that powers Google. He and Brin received the Marconi Prize in 2004 for this work.

Page was born in Lansing, Michigan, to a secular household. His mother is Jewish; her father later moved to Israel. His father, Carl Victor Page Sr., earned a PhD in computer science from the University of Michigan and was described by BBC reporter Will Smale as a pioneer in computer science and artificial intelligence. Page’s paternal grandparents came from a Protestant background. His father taught computer science at Michigan State University, and his mother, Gloria, taught computer programming at the same institution’s Lyman Briggs College. Page’s parents divorced when he was eight, but he remained close with both his mother and his father’s long-term partner, Joyce Wildenthal, also an MSU professor.

When Page was six, his father brought home an Exidy Sorcerer computer, which Page quickly mastered and began using for schoolwork. He later recalled that his childhood home was often messy, cluttered with computers, science magazines, and Popular Science, an environment he fully embraced. As a youth, he was an avid reader, noting in his 2013 Google founders letter that he spent a huge amount of time poring over books and magazines. Writer Nicholas Carlson attributed Page’s creativity and inventiveness to his home atmosphere and attentive parents. Page also studied music composition and played instruments; his parents sent him to Interlochen Arts Camp in Michigan. He has said that his musical training fueled his impatience and obsession with speed in computing, explaining that in music, time is paramount—hitting something in milliseconds matters. He became the first kid in his elementary school to submit a word-processed assignment. His older brother, Carl Victor Page Jr., taught him to take things apart, and Page soon dismantled everything in the house to understand how it worked. By age 12, he knew he would eventually start a company.

Page attended Okemos Montessori School from ages two to seven, then East Lansing High School, graduating in 1991. He spent two summers at Interlochen Center for the Arts, playing flute and saxophone. He earned a Bachelor of Science in Engineering (computer engineering) with honors from the University of Michigan in 1995, and a Master of Science in computer science from Stanford University in 1998.

At the University of Michigan, Page built an inkjet printer from Lego bricks—a line plotter—after reverse-engineering an ink cartridge and constructing the electronics and mechanics to drive it. He served as president of the Beta Epsilon chapter of the Eta Kappa Nu honor society and was a member of the 1993 “Maize & Blue” University of Michigan Solar Car team. As an undergraduate, he proposed replacing the campus bus system with a driverless monorail, and he also developed a business plan for a software-based music synthesizer.

While pursuing a PhD in computer science at Stanford, Page searched for a dissertation topic. He considered exploring the mathematical properties of the World Wide Web, treating its link structure as a giant graph. His advisor, Terry Winograd, encouraged this direction—Page later called it the best advice he ever received. He also briefly considered research on telepresence and self-driving cars. Page focused on determining which web pages linked to a given page, reasoning that the number and nature of those backlinks held valuable information. The role of citations in academic publishing also informed his approach.