Google’s Wins Make Founders Brin And Page $50 Billion Richer
While AI was supposed to gut Google's core business and rivals like Meta and Tesla have stumbled badly this year, Alphabet's founders are sitting on a jaw-dropping windfall that tells a very different story.
Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOG | GOOG Price Prediction), especially its Google unit, has had a remarkable year, at least compared to the other Magnificent Seven companies. Its stock price is up 10% this year. That’s not a home run, but it’s better than Meta (NASDAQ: META) (down 15%) and Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) (down 22%).
Alphabet ranks third in market cap among the world’s public companies at $4.21 trillion, which is close behind Apple ($4.53 trillion). Founder Sergey Brin owns 3% but has shares that give him control of the company, along with Larry Page, who also owns 3%. Each has a net worth increase of slightly more than $25 billion this year.
Google’s search business is supposed to be crippled by AI, which is often used as a search engine. Alphabet’s overall revenue rose 24% to $119.8 billion in the most recent quarter. Google Search revenue rose 17% to $63.2 billion. Cloud operations were a home run, up 81% to $21.7 billion. Since the cloud industry is nearly as hot as AI among investors, the increase impressed.
YouTube is now the clear leader in video streaming and has moved into the premium streaming sector, threatening companies like Netflix (NASDAQ: NFLX). YouTube revenue rose 13.2% to $11.1 billion in the period. In its most recent quarter, Netflix’s entire revenue was $12.5 billion.
Google’s Gemini AI business has outpaced many estimates for other public companies and trails only OpenAI and Anthropic. The Guardian reports: “The source added, however, that Google still had the benefit of being able to combine its Gemini models with an impressive suite of products, from its all-conquering search product to its cloud platform and YouTube.”
On a much smaller scale, Google’s self-driving car division, Waymo, appears to have taken the lead over rival Tesla, particularly in the cities where it operates. This may matter in the future, but today, financially, it is only a small part of Google’s current success.
Brin and Page are each worth about $280 billion based on the Bloomberg Billionaire Index. Unlike some other people at the top of the list, 2026 has been a good year.
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Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.
McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.
His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.
A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.
TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.
McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.
