Larry Page

Google CEO Larry Page Has a Weird, Troubling Definition of Charity

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TECH TIGHTWADS MAR. 21, 2014

Google CEO Larry Page Has a Weird, Troubling Definition of Charity

By Kevin Roose



Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images; Jordan Strauss/Getty Images

Earlier this week, billionaire Google CEO Larry Page made a strange admission about how he defines philanthropy. In front of a TED audience, while being interviewed by Charlie Rose, Page confirmed what he’d said before – that upon his death, rather than giving his fortune to a nonprofit organization or bequeathing it to his heirs, he would prefer to give it to Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX and Tesla Motors. Musk, Page believes, is the kind of visionary whose ideas will do untold amounts of good for the world, and who could make better use of a gigantic money infusion than a standard charity.
“That’s a company, and that’s philanthropical,” Page said, according to Wired. He also apparently urged audience members to give their money to corporations rather than nonprofits.
This idea – that corporations make better vehicles for humanitarian change than nonprofit organizations – didn’t come out of nowhere. It’s related to philanthrocapitalism, the concept that has taken over the charitable giving world in the last decade, and which counts among its fans billionaires like Bill Gates, Pierre Omidyar, and Michael Bloomberg.
The difference between philanthrocapitalism and Page’s idea of corporate charity is easy to miss, but it’s important. Philanthrocapitalists believe that charities should be run more like businesses – with performance benchmarks, metrics-based analysis, and accountability to stakeholders. They think, broadly, that charities should apply the methods of big business to their own operations, and that for-profit ventures can supplement the role of the nonprofit sector in solving humanity’s biggest problems.
That’s a widely accepted view, and there’s nothing particularly controversial about it in 2014. Page, though, is going further. He’s saying that companies like SpaceX and Tesla are themselves philanthropic organizations, and that supporting those companies financially is preferable to supporting charitable causes in the traditional way. Given that Page doesn’t have much of a public track record of conventional charitable giving, we can assume he’s not just speaking theoretically.
There are a few problems with Page’s vision of charitable corporatism. One is a simple definitional issue – corporations aren’t required to produce gains for anybody other than their shareholders, whereas 501(c)(3) organizations can’t be operated for the benefit of private interests. Elon Musk may want to improve humanity’s lot with his space exploration, but SpaceX is a for-profit, Delaware-chartered corporation, and as such, the goal of making the world a better place will always be secondary to the business motive. It has to be – it’s right there in the corporate charter.
The bigger problem, though, is that Page’s brand of charity, when put into practice, can distance philanthropic capital from its intended recipients.
Imagine a billionaire whose pet issue is the plight of orphans. Instead of giving money directly to orphans, or cutting checks to charities that run orphanages, the billionaire decides to fund “Orphn,” a (made-up) for-profit start-up that connects orphans to adoption-ready parents and takes a small fee from each successful pairing.
Orphn might be wildly successful, giving homes to millions of orphans and producing billions of dollars in profits for the company itself. But why stop there? For maximum impact, the billionaire realizes that he could produce better returns by creating an entire generation of start-up humanitarians. So he gives his money to Harvard Business School, earmarked for a fellowship in entrepreneurial orphan assistance. Pretty soon, the money that was once going to orphans is now going to an Ivy League university, with no assurance that it will ever trickle down to actual orphans.
This kind of rationalization happens all the time with donors from the business world, and it’s easy to see why. Rich businesspeople like structure. They trust professionally managed institutions more than individuals. (Especially poor individuals.) They hate inefficiencies, and they love scalability. To them, cutting a check to an African farmer using GiveDirectly feels like throwing their money into the void. They’d rather set up a foundation to help African farmers through microloans, staff it with American MBAs, and go to sleep at night knowing that their donation will produce value for decades to come.

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TECH TIGHTWADS MAR. 21, 2014

Google CEO Larry Page Has a Weird, Troubling Definition of Charity

By Kevin Roose



Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images; Jordan Strauss/Getty Images

Earlier this week, billionaire Google CEO Larry Page made a strange admission about how he defines philanthropy. In front of a TED audience, while being interviewed by Charlie Rose, Page confirmed what he’d said before – that upon his death, rather than giving his fortune to a nonprofit organization or bequeathing it to his heirs, he would prefer to give it to Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX and Tesla Motors. Musk, Page believes, is the kind of visionary whose ideas will do untold amounts of good for the world, and who could make better use of a gigantic money infusion than a standard charity.
“That’s a company, and that’s philanthropical,” Page said, according to Wired. He also apparently urged audience members to give their money to corporations rather than nonprofits.
This idea – that corporations make better vehicles for humanitarian change than nonprofit organizations – didn’t come out of nowhere. It’s related to philanthrocapitalism, the concept that has taken over the charitable giving world in the last decade, and which counts among its fans billionaires like Bill Gates, Pierre Omidyar, and Michael Bloomberg.
The difference between philanthrocapitalism and Page’s idea of corporate charity is easy to miss, but it’s important. Philanthrocapitalists believe that charities should be run more like businesses – with performance benchmarks, metrics-based analysis, and accountability to stakeholders. They think, broadly, that charities should apply the methods of big business to their own operations, and that for-profit ventures can supplement the role of the nonprofit sector in solving humanity’s biggest problems.
That’s a widely accepted view, and there’s nothing particularly controversial about it in 2014. Page, though, is going further. He’s saying that companies like SpaceX and Tesla are themselves philanthropic organizations, and that supporting those companies financially is preferable to supporting charitable causes in the traditional way. Given that Page doesn’t have much of a public track record of conventional charitable giving, we can assume he’s not just speaking theoretically.
There are a few problems with Page’s vision of charitable corporatism. One is a simple definitional issue – corporations aren’t required to produce gains for anybody other than their shareholders, whereas 501(c)(3) organizations can’t be operated for the benefit of private interests. Elon Musk may want to improve humanity’s lot with his space exploration, but SpaceX is a for-profit, Delaware-chartered corporation, and as such, the goal of making the world a better place will always be secondary to the business motive. It has to be – it’s right there in the corporate charter.
The bigger problem, though, is that Page’s brand of charity, when put into practice, can distance philanthropic capital from its intended recipients.
Imagine a billionaire whose pet issue is the plight of orphans. Instead of giving money directly to orphans, or cutting checks to charities that run orphanages, the billionaire decides to fund “Orphn,” a (made-up) for-profit start-up that connects orphans to adoption-ready parents and takes a small fee from each successful pairing.
Orphn might be wildly successful, giving homes to millions of orphans and producing billions of dollars in profits for the company itself. But why stop there? For maximum impact, the billionaire realizes that he could produce better returns by creating an entire generation of start-up humanitarians. So he gives his money to Harvard Business School, earmarked for a fellowship in entrepreneurial orphan assistance. Pretty soon, the money that was once going to orphans is now going to an Ivy League university, with no assurance that it will ever trickle down to actual orphans.
This kind of rationalization happens all the time with donors from the business world, and it’s easy to see why. Rich businesspeople like structure. They trust professionally managed institutions more than individuals. (Especially poor individuals.) They hate inefficiencies, and they love scalability. To them, cutting a check to an African farmer using GiveDirectly feels like throwing their money into the void. They’d rather set up a foundation to help African farmers through microloans, staff it with American MBAs, and go to sleep at night knowing that their donation will produce value for decades to come.
Smart charities have learned to flatter the entrepreneurial philanthropist by appealing to these instincts. (See how the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, the organization that just got a $1 billion donation from Mark Zuckerberg, advises its staff to “Remember that most entrepreneurs undertake philanthropy to help fix problems with the money, expertise, and ‘uniquely optimistic’ passion that worked in building their businesses.”) But that kind of strategy won’t work on people like Page, for whom the appeal of nonprofits run like corporations is inferior to the appeal of corporations themselves.
There are many models of charitable giving, and many of them are worthy and useful. To an extent, we’re talking about shades of good here. But if Page’s model catches on, it could result in a lot of CEOs getting their philanthropic warm-fuzzies by contributing to Apple, Google, Facebook, or any number of other for-profit entities. That money could go to waste if those companies spend it developing unsuccessful products or paying outrageous salaries to executives. And it could mean that a lot of nonprofit organizations find their donor pool evaporating.
Buying stock in Microsoft is simply not the same as giving money to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. They have different mandates, different goals, and different beneficiaries. Elon Musk might be a genius – he may even end up colonizing Mars, and improving the lives of billions. But we shouldn’t confuse his company for a cause, and we shouldn’t let Larry Page’s hero-worship – as well-meaning as it is – elide the difference between corporations and charities. They’re very different things, no matter how much one masquerades as the other.

Google Billionaire Larry Page's $400 Million 'Philanthropic Sleight of Hand' Raises Questions About Charity Loophole

Google co-founder and billionaire Larry Page is the subject of a report Wednesday from tech journal ReCode which shows how the Silicon Valley super-rich use workarounds in managing their private foundations that avoid direct contributions to actual charities.
Page's Carl Victor Page Memorial Foundation pushed around $400 million in publicly announced Christmastime donations between 2015 and 2017, but none of it reportedly went directly to charity.
"This a very bad look for Larry Page," tweeted National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy researcher Ryan Schlegel.

As ReCode reporter Teddy Schleifer described in his piece on the billionaire, Page's foundation funnels cash primarily into funds which allow their benefactor a measure of control.
"What Page was doing each year was something of a philanthropic sleight of hand," wrote Schleifer.

Private foundations are required by law to disburse at least 5 percent of their assets a year, a requirement meant to make sure that these taxpayer-subsidized philanthropies actually took part in charity.
But in recent years, Page's foundation has made last-minute donations to hit the threshold only by making bulk donations to separate charitable accounts Page also had some control over, donor-advised funds (DAFs). Those donations technically count as contributions by the foundation, helping it meet the 5 percent standard, even though that money can then sit in the donor-advised funds indefinitely, with no requirement that it goes to needy nonprofits.

"Donations from the foundations to the DAF count toward the 5 percent, even if the DAF then sits on the millions indefinitely," Schleifer added.
The billionaire did donate $21 million from his foundation to charity, but, as ReCode shows, the amount funnelled to DAFs was far greater.

Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin gave $438 million to charities through their foundations last year. Here's where the tech gurus' huge donations went.
nm2021, Google's cofounders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, collectively gave away nearly half a billion dollars from their philanthropic foundations. But looking below the eye-popping dollar figures reveals fascinating differences in how the legendary search-engine wizards distribute their similar largesse.
From tech moguls to media magnates, almost every modern billionaire has a few items in their starter kit: yachts, business investments, sprawling real estate, and, of course, a charitable foundation. Philanthropy serves a variety of purposes for today's wealthy, from avoiding taxes to bolstering reputations to making the world better through genuine passion projects.
Brin and Page operate established foundations that give out millions of dollars a year. But since stepping away from Google and its parent company, Alphabet, in 2019, they've taken drastically different paths in life, as Insider detailed in a recent investigation: While Brin has remained relatively in the public eye, Page has shrouded his life in the utmost secrecy.
This contrast extends even to their approaches to philanthropy, tax documents obtained by Insider show.

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In 2021, Google's cofounders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, collectively gave away nearly half a billion dollars from their philanthropic foundations. But looking below the eye-popping dollar figures reveals fascinating differences in how the legendary search-engine wizards distribute their similar largesse.
From tech moguls to media magnates, almost every modern billionaire has a few items in their starter kit: yachts, business investments, sprawling real estate, and, of course, a charitable foundation. Philanthropy serves a variety of purposes for today's wealthy, from avoiding taxes to bolstering reputations to making the world better through genuine passion projects.

Brin and Page operate established foundations that give out millions of dollars a year. But since stepping away from Google and its parent company, Alphabet, in 2019, they've taken drastically different paths in life, as Insider detailed in a recent investigation: While Brin has remained relatively in the public eye, Page has shrouded his life in the utmost secrecy.
This contrast extends even to their approaches to philanthropy, tax documents obtained by Insider show.

2 moguls, 2 different approaches to charities

Brin's personal foundation, the Sergey Brin Family Foundation, disbursed roughly $250 million in both 2020 and 2021.
The nonprofit's 990 forms filed with the IRS show dozens of causes the foundation has picked to donate to. The largest donation in 2021 was roughly $101 million given to the Michael J. Fox Foundation, which invests in research around Parkinson's disease. Brin's mother was diagnosed with the disease in the 1990s, and he has estimated he has about a 50-50 chance of developing the disease himself.
Some other notable recipients of his largesse include ClimateWorks Foundation ($7.5 million), which is dedicated to fighting the climate crisis; LifeMoves ($8 million), a nonprofit that supports homeless people; and the National Foundation for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ($15.3 million), along with other medical, environmental, educational, and human-rights-related causes. Brin has in recent years also shown an interest in more offbeat causes and organizations, like the Open Lunar Foundation, a nonprofit advocating moon colonization.
Brin, 49, also appears to play a fairly active role in steering these donations. The documents indicate he spends about two hours a week working on the philanthropic organization. And in addition to the donations the foundation made, Brin pulled out his pocketbook to give $130 million directly to the Michael J. Fox Foundation.

Google’s founders didn’t market test Alphabet’s name before launching the now $1.9 trillion juggernaut. Here’s the advice Steve Jobs gave Larry Page

Even from Google’s inception, cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin considered the company’s potential for astronomical growth. Named after “googol,” the term for the numeral 1 with 100 zeros behind it, Google, then just a search engine founded in 1998, would become as large as the internet would allow.

The company has far exceeded the parameters of just the internet. Valued at about $1.9 trillion, Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent company, ranks No. 1 on Fortune’s 2024 Most Innovative Companies list. Broken into three segments—Google Services, Google Cloud, and Other Bets—Alphabet’s reach spans from Android, Chrome, YouTube, and its Bard AI chatbot under its Services umbrella, to cloud computing under its Cloud umbrella, to private equity fund CapitalG, DeepMind AI research, and Waymo under its Other Bets umbrella. Google Services makes up 90% of the company’s revenue, Fortune calculated from Alphabet’s 2023 fourth-quarter earnings report.
Page, the eighth-richest person in the world with a net worth of about $136 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, has certainly reaped the rewards of Alphabet’s success. With stints as CEO of Google from 1997 to 2001 and 2011 to 2015, and of Alphabet until 2019, Page remains a board member and shareholder of his company, effectively controlling it alongside cofounder Brin.
Tuesday is Page’s 51st birthday, and while he’s another year older and wiser, it was Apple cofounder Steve Jobs who imparted some prescient wisdom about the company’s future, which now boasts the sixth-largest market capitalization in the world.
Page visited Jobs toward the end of Jobs’ life in 2011 to receive some frank advice from his mentor: “The main thing I stressed was focus,” Jobs said, according to Walter Isaacson, author of Jobs’ biography. “It’s now all over the map. What are the five products you want to focus on? Get rid of the rest, because they’re dragging you down. They’re turning you into Microsoft. They’re causing you to turn out products that are adequate but not great.”
“He was right,” Page told Fortune CEO Alan Murray at Fortune’s Global Forum in 2015, just days after Alphabet’s October founding. “I mean, he did fine as well.”

Larry Page Net Worth 2024: Behind His $129 Billion Google Empire

Larry Page, the co-founder of Google, holds a spot in the list of the 10 richest people in the world – and the number one spot as the richest person in California.
As of 2024, Larry Page’s net worth is estimated at $129 billion.
It’s no wonder that Page has amassed a gargantuan fortune for creating arguably the most influential company in the world right now. He has been deeply intertwined with Google for a long time too. He has even been Google’s CEO twice.
Since 2019, he has remained a board member of Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent company. In addition to his stake in Google, he also earns a fortune from investments and other business ventures.
In this article, we’ll break down the main and publicly known sources of Larry Page’s net worth.
Larry Page is generally a very private person, making it hard to pinpoint every source of his estimated net worth.
Nevertheless, we were able to track down enough public sources of information to piece together a holistic estimate of his net worth. He is also the seventh richest person in the world and such wealth is impossible to break down to the million.
Based on what we found, here are his efforts which made his fortune what it is today:
Lawrence Edward Page, known as Larry Page, was born on March 26, 1973, in East Lansing, Michigan.
Both of Page’s parents were computer science professors, so young Larry grew up surrounded by computers and technology, which gave him a very strong foundation for his future career in computing.
His father, Carl Victor Page Sr., held a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Michigan and soon came back to become a professor at the same university. His mother, Gloria, was a computer programming instructor at Lyman Briggs College at Michigan State University.
Even though his parents divorced when Larry Page was only eight years old, he maintained a good relationship with both.
When he was only six years old, Page tinkered with first-generation personal computers that his parents had left scattered around the home, and he was the first elementary student in his school to submit an assignment that was not manually written, but instead typed on a word processor.
His older brother, Carl Victor Page Sr., taught Larry Page how to disassemble hardware. He used his new skill to take apart everything at home to learn how it functioned.
Larry Page attended Okemos Montessori School and went on to graduate from East Lansing High School in 1991. While in high school, he attended the art camp “Interlochen Center for the Arts” where he practiced playing the saxophone. At one point, Page mentioned that his musical training brought up a fascination with speed and impatience in his computing career.

Why it makes sense for Larry Page to donate his billions to Elon Musk

Three years ago, opens new tab, with a post entitled “philanthropy isn’t for profit”, I expressed the hope that we had finally reached a turning point, and that people would “do good to do good, rather than simply declaring that the best way they can do good is to chase profit as zealously as possible”. And maybe I was right. That post was directed in part at Matthew Bishop, who had written a silly article, opens new tab asking whether IBM had done more good for the world than the Carnegie philanthropies. But this evening, when I ran into Bishop at an event for rich people in a swanky midtown club, he couldn’t bring himself to defend Larry Page, who said, opens new tab something similar, opens new tab at TED:

Page’s comments have already been attacked by Kevin Roose, opens new tab, and, as I say, they’re not going to be defended by Matthew Bishop. But here’s the weird thing: Page’s ideas aren’t nearly as dumb as they might seem at first blush. In fact, even I can defend them — and I’m the kind of person who generally hates, opens new tab the way that rich people give away their money.

Page, with his unorthodox idea, deftly sidesteps most of the mistakes that rich people make with their charitable donations. Most importantly, there’s nothing self-serving about Larry Page giving his money to Elon Musk: there isn’t any ego boost involved, and there isn’t even a tax deduction. Instead, Page is simply trying to work out how his money is most likely to have a positive transformational effect on the world.

The fact is that private philanthropy almost never has such an effect: big-picture changes to the world come from commerce and from government, not from gifting. Exxon Mobil has changed the world; Phillip Morris has changed the world. Apple and Microsoft and Cisco and Intel have changed the world. Monsanto and Cargill and ADM have changed the world; Pfizer and Roche and Novartis have changed the world. Certainly Great Britain and France and Russia and China and the US of A have changed the world, many times each

And, as Page knows better than anyone, Google has changed the world.

Page is convinced (I agree with him on this, but I’m not going to argue the point here) that Google has been a positive force in the world. Indeed, it has been a more positive force than at least 99% of philanthropies. A philanthropist with $100,000 in 1998 who wanted to make the world a better place could hardly have done better than Andy Bechtolsheim, the first funder of Google — even if you ignore any good that Bechtolsheim might end up doing with the billions that investment ultimately became.

$6.7 billion foundation directs almost all grants to DAFs

The Carl Victor Page Memorial Foundation, established by Google co-founder Larry Page and named after his father, has grown from $2.9 billion in assets in 2018 to $6.7 billion in 2021, with nearly all awards directed to donor-advised funds (DAFs), Inside Philanthropy reports.

As a result of the surging share price of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, the below-the-radar foundation has become one of the largest philanthropies in the United States. The foundation awarded more than $600 million in grants between 2017 and 2021, including approximately $227 million distributed across 2020 and 2021. Although the foundation’s 990-PF forms indicate that Page directed nearly $700 million into the foundation over those two years, the increased value of Alphabet shares boosted its endowment by more than $4 billion.

With the exception of relatively small grants to the American Cancer Society and New Venture Fund, the foundation directed 97.8 percent of its grants to DAFs, including accounts at the National Philanthropic Trust and Schwab Charitable Fund.

“The use of DAFs, often in combination with a private foundation, has been growing rapidly, especially by certain Silicon Valley billionaires,” noted Inside Philanthropy. “Page has long been criticized…for operating at the extreme end of this practice.”

Over the last few years, donor-advised funds, or DAFs, have ballooned in popularity as charitable giving vehicles for the ultra-wealthy. They come with generous tax benefits, have few disclosure or payout requirements and require less oversight on the donor’s part because the funds are sponsored by public charities that help manage them (and technically have final say over where the money goes). A new report released Tuesday by National Philanthropic Trust, one of the country’s biggest sponsors of DAFs with $30 billion in assets under management, shows just how much DAF adoption has grown, with record highs for both grants paid out and contributions received last year.

In 2022, contributions to DAFs throughout the U.S. hit a new high of $86 billion, a $8 billion increase from the prior year. Charitable gifts paid out by DAFs also hit a new high of $52 billion, up from $48 billion in 2021, according to the National Philanthropic Trust (NPT) report. The study looked at 1,151 charitable organizations that sponsor DAFs, and data is sourced primarily from the IRS Form 990, the annual information return that 501(c)(3) charities are required to file. Assets held in DAFs shrunk to $229 billion in 2022 from $231 billion the year before, largely due to a stock market downturn (it’s common for donor-advised funds to hold shares of publicly-traded stock).

“This is the most interesting report we've had in a long time,” says Eileen Heisman, CEO of National Philanthropic Trust. “It comes on the heels of two really aggressive years of growth and grantmaking. During the pandemic, and when the market was up, people were at home thinking about the world and what they wanted to do about it.” The 2022 report reflects the market correction after its 2021 boom, and Heisman says she’s pleasantly surprised that grants and contributions are both still up from 2021—and that assets held in DAFs only shrunk by around 1%.

DAF usage is especially common among the ultra-wealthy. Many billionaires including Tesla CEO and the world’s richest person Elon Musk, Google cofounder Larry Page, Meta cofounder Mark Zuckerberg, WhatsApp cofounder Jan Koum, philanthropist MacKenzie Scott and hedge fund tycoon Ray Dalio route some of their giving through the tax-advantaged entities. (Of the high-net-worth individuals surveyed in a 2023 Bank of America report on Charitable Giving by Affluent Households, tax considerations were their top reason for using DAFs, with 63% of them citing them as a reason.)

Larry Page’s Foundation Is Worth $6.7 Billion, But Where Is the Money Going?

Larry Page’s philanthropic foundation has quietly grown into one of the largest charitable organizations in the U.S. in recent years, with a reported $6.7 billion in assets as of 2024

But hardly any of the Google (GOOGL) co-founder’s grants go directly to charity, according to the foundation’s tax filings. Instead, the vast majority of its charitable contributions are given to donor-advised funds, which are administered by community foundations and charitable arms of firms.

While donor-advised funds have grown in popularity due to their flexible transparency requirements and the fact that funds don’t have to be immediately disbursed, some experts claim they are used by the wealthy to earn tax benefits while delaying charitable donations.

“It’s not surprising Page would be putting his money in a donor-advised fund, nor is it surprising he would be criticized for doing so,” Leslie Lenkowsky, a professor of philanthropic studies at Indiana University, told Observer.

Page is currently the world’s eighth wealthiest person with an estimated net worth of $109 billion. The former CEO of Google and Alphabet (GOOGL) established the Carl Victor Memorial Foundation, named for his late father, in 2004. While it had around $7.5 million in assets as of the following year, this number has since skyrocketed.

The foundation’s endowment has nearly doubled in the past few years, from $3.6 million in 2019 and $4.5 million in 2020 to $6.7 billion as of 2021, the most recent year for which tax filings are available, as first reported by Inside Philanthropy. Its growth in assets can be largely attributed to the rising value of Alphabet shares, which made up around $3.5 million of the foundation’s most recently reported endowment.