Alphabet Inc.


Alphabet Inc. is an American multinational technology conglomerate holding company headquartered in Mountain View, California. Alphabet is the world's second-largest technology company by revenue, after Nvidia, the largest technology company by profit, and one of the world's most valuable companies. It was created through a restructuring of Google on October 2, 2015, and became the parent holding company of Google and several former Google subsidiaries. Alphabet is listed on the large-cap section of the Nasdaq under the ticker symbols GOOGL and GOOG; both classes of stock are components of major stock market indices such as the S&P 500 and Nasdaq-100. Alphabet has been described as a Big Tech company.
The establishment of Alphabet Inc. was prompted by a desire to make the core Google business "cleaner and more accountable" while allowing greater autonomy to group companies that operate in businesses other than Internet services. Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin announced their resignation from their executive posts in December 2019, with the CEO role to be filled by Sundar Pichai, who is also the CEO of Google. Page and Brin remain employees, board members, and controlling shareholders of Alphabet Inc.
Alphabet Inc. has faced numerous legal and ethical controversies, including a 2017 lawsuit against Uber over stolen self-driving technology, a 2020 privacy settlement over Google+ data exposure, and multiple antitrust actions from the United States, France, and Japan. It has also been accused of labor law violations related to worker organizing and was forced to file for bankruptcy in Russia after its bank account was seized in 2022. In 2023, the company was widely criticized for mass layoffs that impacted 12,000 employees, many of whom discovered their termination only upon losing account access.

History

On August 10, 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.
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, 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 antitrust law. This marked the first antitrust 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.

Structure

Alphabet Inc. is the parent of a diverse set of subsidiaries.
, their equity is held by a subsidiary known as XXVI Holdings, Inc., so that they can be valued and legally separated from Google. At the same time, it was announced that Google would be reorganized as a limited liability company, Google LLC. Eric Schmidt said at an Internet Association event in 2015 that there may eventually be more than 26 Alphabet subsidiaries. He also said that he was currently meeting with the CEOs of the current and proposed Alphabet subsidiaries. He said, "You'll see a lot coming." While many companies or divisions formerly a part of Google became subsidiaries of Alphabet, Google remains the umbrella company for Alphabet's Internet-related businesses. These include widely used products and services long associated with Google, such as the Android operating system, YouTube, and Google Search, which remain direct components of Google.
Former subsidiaries include Nest Labs, which was merged into Google in February 2018, and Chronicle Security, which was merged with Google Cloud in June 2019. Sidewalk Labs was absorbed into Google in 2021 following CEO Daniel L. Doctoroff's departure from the company due to a suspected ALS diagnosis. In January 2021, Loon LLC CEO Alastair Westgarth mentioned in a blog post that the company would be shutting down, citing lack of a scalable and sustainable business model. In July 2021, Alphabet announced Intrinsic, a new robotics software company spun out of X. In November 2021, Alphabet announced a new company named Isomorphic Labs, using artificial intelligence for drug discovery and headed by DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis.

Ownership

Alphabet is mainly owned by institutional investors, who own over 60% of shares. The founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin each control around 3% of all shares, but control with other insiders the majority of voting shares. The largest shareholders in December 2023 were:
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List of former board chairs

  1. Eric Schmidt

    List of former chief executives

  2. Larry Page

    Corporate identity

Page explained the origin of the company's name, stating: "We liked the name Alphabet because it means a collection of letters that represent language, one of humanity's most important innovations, and is the core of how we index with Google search! We also like that it means alpha‑bet, which we strive for!" In a 2018 talk, Schmidt disclosed that the original inspiration for the name came from the location of the then Google Hamburg office's street address: ABC-Straße.
Alphabet uses the domain with the.xyz top-level domain, which was introduced in 2014. It does not own the domain , which is owned by a fleet management division of BMW. Following the announcement, BMW said it would be "necessary to examine the legal trademark implications" of the proposals. Additionally, it does not own the domain , which is the domain of the Disney-owned American Broadcasting Company. Google's mission statement, from the outset, was "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful", and its unofficial slogan is "Don't be evil". In October 2015, a related motto was adopted in the Alphabet corporate code of conduct: "Do the right thing". The original motto was retained in the code of conduct of Google, now a subsidiary of Alphabet.