The story
Founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin on Oct 2, 2015.1
On August 11, 2015, Google announced plans to create a new public holding company, Alphabet Inc. Google co-founder and CEO Larry Page made this announcement in a blog post on Google's official blog. Alphabet was created to restructure Google by moving subsidiaries from Google to Alphabet, thus narrowing Google's scope. The new holding company would consist of Google as well as other businesses including X Development, Calico, Nest, Verily, Fiber, CapitalG, and GV. Sundar Pichai, the company's Product Chief, became the new chief executive officer of Google, replacing Page, who transitioned to the role of running Alphabet, along with co-founder Sergey Brin. Alphabet is the world's second-largest technology company by revenue, after Nvidia, the largest technology company by profit, and the world's most valuable companies.
In his announcement, Page stated that the planned holding company would allow for "more management scale, as we can run things independently that aren't very related" to Google. He clarified that, as a result of the new holding company, Google would be "a bit slimmed down, with the companies that are pretty far afield of our main internet products contained in Alphabet instead". He further stated that the motivation behind the reorganization is to make Google "cleaner and more accountable and better" and that he wanted to improve "the transparency and oversight of what we're doing".
Former executive Eric Schmidt revealed in the conference in 2017 the inspiration for this structure came from Warren Buffett and his management structure of Berkshire Hathaway a decade ago. Schmidt said he encouraged Page and Brin to meet with Buffett in Omaha to see how Berkshire Hathaway was a holding company made of subsidiaries with strong CEOs who were trusted to run their businesses.
Before it became a subsidiary of Alphabet, Google Inc. was first structured as the owner of Alphabet. The roles were reversed after a placeholder subsidiary was created for the ownership of Alphabet, at which point the newly formed subsidiary was merged with Google. Google's stock was then converted to Alphabet's stock. Under the Delaware General Corporation Law (where Alphabet is incorporated), a holding company reorganization such as this can be done without a vote of shareholders, as this reorganization was. The restructuring process was completed on October 2, 2015. Alphabet retains Google Inc.'s stock price history and continues to trade under Google Inc.'s former ticker symbols "GOOG" and "GOOGL".
On December 3, 2019, Page and Brin jointly announced that they would step down from their respective roles, remaining as employees and still the majority vote on the board of directors. Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, assumed the CEO role at Alphabet while retaining the same at Google. The firm completed a stock split in mid-2022. On January 20, 2023, Pichai wrote a letter to all employees announcing that the company would be laying off about 12,000 jobs, or 6% of its global workforce. In the letter, Pichai wrote, "Over the past two years we've seen periods of dramatic growth. To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today."
In January 2024, Waymo, the autonomous driving division of Alphabet Inc., which operates extensively in San Francisco, filed an application with the California Public Utilities Commission to expand service in Los Angeles. Such a license would allow the company to make full use of its fleet in the city instead of test drives by invitation. In August 2024, following the lawsuit filed by the United States Department of Justice in 2020, a United States district court found Alphabet guilty of violating anti-trust law. This marked the first anti-trust ruling against a U.S. company in 24 years. Alphabet has appealed the ruling.
On 10 December 2024, Alphabet's shares rose about 5% after the company unveiled its new quantum computing chip, Willow. The chip solved a complex problem in five minutes, a task that would take a classical computer longer than the age of the universe. Willow reduces error rates in quantum computing and can correct them in real time. Alphabet's stock was up 25% for the year, marking its best day since April 2024. On 15 September 2025, Alphabet became the fourth company—trailing Nvidia, Microsoft, and Apple—to top $3 trillion in market cap. At the time, shares were up more than 32% for the year amid optimism for AI adoption and a more-favorable-than-expected antitrust ruling that did not require the company to divest its Chrome browser platform.
According to an analysis by Bridgewater Associates, Alphabet, along with Amazon, Meta and Microsoft are expected to collectively invest about $650 billion to scale up AI-related infrastructure in 2026.
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On June 1, 2026, Alphabet announced plans to raise $80 billion through a series of equity offerings to fund the expansion of its AI infrastructure. As part of the initiative, Berkshire Hathaway agreed to invest $10 billion in Alphabet through a private placement.
From Wikipedia’s article on Alphabet Inc., shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.9