Google's Visionary CEO Larry Page Has Some Very Big Plans

The inspiration for what we now know as Google came to Larry Page in a dream. Now fully awake, the enigmatic CEO of Alphabet is on a mission to solve the world’s biggest problems, including mortality itself.

- William D. Cohan

Twenty years ago, when he was still a graduate student, Larry Page changed the world. Now, with a fortune estimated at $36 billion, he wants to do it again.

Is the CEO of Alphabet, Inc., the newly created holding company for Google, the planet’s dominant search engine, and for a bunch of loosely related businesses he hopes will someday allow every one of us to, among other things, have universal access to the totality of information known to man; be ferried by driverless, energy-efficient cars wherever we want to go; and live forever.

In other words, Page’s ambition is nearly limitless, and, thanks to the billions of dollars in cash flow that Google generates each year, he may be one of the few people with the resources to pull it off. Page may also be poised to revolutionize the way modern corporations function. He has long worried that companies get stuck doing the same thing repeatedly and become content with incremental change. Innovators tend to get frustrated and leave. He wants Alphabet to be a place where entrepreneurs stay. He may succeed at this, too. Asked recently about the goal of Alphabet’s eclectic mix of projects, Page said he likes to apply some simple rules: “Is that thing really, really important? Is it going to affect everyone in the world? Is it going to affect a lot of people every day?” Needless to say, very few CEOs think this way.