Google Owner Name: Founders, CEO, and Who Controls Google Today

The Google owner name question has three honest answers depending on what you mean. Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google and still hold controlling voting power. Sundar Pichai runs it as CEO. And Alphabet Inc. is the corporate parent that legally owns Google as a subsidiary. All three answers are correct — for different versions of the question.

Three Names — Three Different Roles

Most articles give you one name and call it a day. That's how confusion spreads.

"Who owns Google" isn't a simple question. Someone asking the Google owner name might want to know who started it, who's running it right now, or who holds controlling power over the company. Those are three different people — and three different answers.

Here's the short version before we go deeper:

• Larry Page and Sergey Brin — co-founders, stepped back from operations in 2019, but retain voting control

• Sundar Pichai — current CEO of both Google and Alphabet Inc.

• Alphabet Inc. — the parent company that legally owns Google

If you only needed one name, Sundar Pichai is who runs Google today. If you want to understand who actually controls the company's direction at the highest level, that still comes back to Page and Brin — through a share structure that most people don't know about.

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Who Founded Google — Larry Page and Sergey Brin

The Origin

In the mid-1990s, Larry Page and Sergey Brin were both PhD students in computer science at Stanford University. They started collaborating on a research project about how web pages link to each other — essentially trying to figure out which pages were most relevant to a given search. 

That project became a prototype search engine. They called it "Backrub" initially, then renamed it Google.

The name came from "googol" — the mathematical term for 1 followed by 100 zeros. The idea was that the search engine would handle a near-infinite amount of information. The spelling was a misspelling that stuck.

They incorporated Google Inc. in September 1998. Page initially served as CEO; Brin was President. The company started in a rented garage in Menlo Park, California.

Where They Stand Now

Here's where it gets nuanced — and where a lot of articles leave people with the wrong impression.

Page and Brin stepped away from all executive and operational roles in December 2019. They announced it in a letter, describing themselves as moving into the role of "proud parents." They don't run Google's day-to-day business. They don't sit in the CEO chair. They're not making product decisions.

But they haven't disappeared from the company either. Both remain on Alphabet's board of directors. And more importantly — they retain significant voting control through a share structure that was built specifically to keep it that way.

So are they still the "owners"? In an operational sense, no. In a governance and control sense, largely yes. The distinction matters.

Who Runs Google Right Now — Sundar Pichai

Sundar Pichai is the current CEO of Google — and also the CEO of Alphabet Inc., Google's parent company. He holds both roles simultaneously.

Pichai joined Google in 2004 and worked his way up through product roles, most notably overseeing Chrome and Android. In 2015, when Page and Brin created Alphabet and shifted their focus there, Pichai was appointed CEO of Google. Then in December 2019, when Page and Brin stepped back from Alphabet entirely, Pichai took on the Alphabet CEO role as well.

What's often overlooked is just how unusual this dual role is. Running the subsidiary and the parent company at the same time concentrates a lot of operational responsibility in one person. In practice, this means Pichai is the most visible decision-maker across both entities.

He is the Google owner name most people are looking for if their question is about who leads the company right now. He's the one in front of Congress when Google gets called to testify. He's the one on earnings calls. He's the operational face of the company.That said — owning and running are different things.

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Who Owns and Controls Google at the Corporate Level

Alphabet Inc. — Google's Parent

In August 2015, Google announced it was restructuring. Larry Page and Sergey Brin created a new holding company called Alphabet Inc. Google became a wholly owned subsidiary of Alphabet. Page became CEO of Alphabet; Brin became President.

The idea was to separate Google's core businesses — search, advertising, Android, YouTube — from the longer-horizon bets the founders wanted to pursue, like self-driving cars, life sciences, and other experimental ventures. Those "other bets" would live under Alphabet alongside Google, but separately.

Alphabet is publicly traded on NASDAQ under two tickers: GOOGL and GOOG. The difference between the two is about voting rights — which brings us to the part most people don't know.

The Share Structure — Why Page and Brin Still Matter

Google — and later Alphabet — issued multiple classes of shares:

Class A shares — one vote per share. These are what most public investors hold.

Class B shares — ten votes per share. These are held almost exclusively by Page and Brin. They are not publicly traded.

Class C shares — zero votes. These carry economic value (dividends, price appreciation) but no say in governance.

The practical effect of this structure is significant. Even though Alphabet is a public company with millions of shareholders, Page and Brin's Class B holdings give them disproportionate voting power relative to their economic ownership stake. They can — and do — retain effective control over major company decisions even while not involved in daily operations.

This is why describing Google as simply "publicly owned" is technically accurate but practically incomplete. At first glance, "public company" implies distributed control. But the dual-class structure was deliberately designed to prevent outside shareholders from overriding the founders' vision.

In practice, this usually means that for any significant governance vote — board elections, major strategic decisions — Page and Brin's votes carry far more weight than their share of the company's economic value would suggest.

How the Three Names Fit Together

To make this concrete:

Larry Page and Sergey Brin created Google, built Alphabet as its parent, stepped back from daily operations in 2019, and retain voting control through Class B shares. They are the foundational "owners" in the most meaningful sense.

Sundar Pichai is the CEO of both Google and Alphabet. He runs the company operationally. He doesn't hold the same class of voting shares as the founders.

Alphabet Inc. is the corporate entity that legally owns Google. It is publicly traded. Its shareholders own economic stakes in the business — but not necessarily controlling votes. These three layers coexist. None of them cancels the others out.

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Conclusion

The Google owner name comes down to three roles: Larry Page and Sergey Brin as founders with retained voting control, Sundar Pichai as current CEO, and Alphabet Inc. as the parent company. Each is correct depending on what "owner" means to you.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Larry Page still the owner of Google? 

Page co-founded Google and retains significant voting control through Class B shares. He stepped away from all operational roles in 2019 but remains an Alphabet board member and controlling shareholder.

undar Pichai. He has been CEO of Google since 2015 and took on the additional role of Alphabet CEO in December 2019 when Page and Brin stepped back.

What is Alphabet and how does it relate to Google? 

Alphabet is Google's parent company, created in 2015. Google operates as a subsidiary of Alphabet. Alphabet also owns other ventures like Waymo and DeepMind.

Is Sundar Pichai the owner of Google? 

No — Pichai is the CEO and operational head, not the controlling owner. Page and Brin retain that through their Class B share structure.

Do Larry Page and Sergey Brin still own Google? 

They remain significant shareholders with majority voting control. But Google is a public company — economic ownership is distributed across many shareholders globally.