Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin lose $60 billion in a morning
Alphabet shares plunged twelve percent after a disappointing third quarter report.
The short version
- Sergey Brin, the Jewish co-founder of Google, lost twenty nine billion.
- Larry Page lost thirty one billion in the massive market drop.
Check your portfolio if you hold tech stocks. Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin just lost a combined $60 billion in a single morning after shares of parent company Alphabet plunged more than 12 percent. According to Forbes, the sudden drop came Thursday after a disappointing third quarter earnings report missed Wall Street revenue expectations.
Sergey Brin, the Jewish billionaire co-founder of Google, saw his fortune drop by $29 billion, while Larry Page lost $31 billion. Both men still hold their spots among the five richest people in the world, with fortunes heavily tied to their equity in the search giant.
Alphabet stock dropped from $321.89 to $283.29 per share following the report. The company revealed it spent $51.4 billion, roughly 40 percent of what it brought in, mostly on artificial intelligence projects and data centers. Business Insider reported that free cash flow turned negative by about $9.1 billion as the company pours money into AI infrastructure.
Investors across Big Tech are growing nervous about the massive spending, matching similar cash burns at Meta, which owns Facebook and WhatsApp, and Amazon, the massive online store chain. Major U.S. tech companies are expected to spend more than $700 billion hyperscaling their AI projects this year alone. That is a lot of money chasing servers while shareholders watch their margins shrink.
Photo: Marcin Mycielski, European Parliament, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons, edited
