Larry
Page

In late 2015, Page and fellow Google co-founder Sergey Brin shocked the business world by putting the internet giant under the umbrella of a new company, Alphabet Inc., along with other holdings including Calico, CapitalG, Jigsaw, Sidewalk Labs and Verily, with the goal of giving the individual divisions greater freedom to operate, unshackled from their web anchor.

Analysts were skeptical of the Alphabet-ization of Google, but the wisdom of Page’s reorganization was borne out by the Q3 2016 earnings report, which boasted $22.45 billion in revenue (up 20% year-over-year), more than half of which came from outside the U.S. But Google and its YouTube division were still responsible for 90% of that revenue.

Page isn’t a mere business suit. The 44-year-old Michigan native has a PhD in computer science from Stanford and invented the Google PageRank search algorithm. He is also one of the founders of the “transhumanist” think tank Singularity University.

Page has also been applying his vision to personal transportation. He is promoter of electric hybrid cars through the philanthropic division Google.org and as an investor in Tesla Motors. But his most significant automotive effort is the self-driving car project in development that was recently given its own unit, dubbed Waymo.