Alphabet, Google’s parent company, owns several businesses that contribute to its overall success. These include businesses in the fields of advertising, health technology, video, security, and navigation. The company has diversified far beyond search engines in the past two decades. The parent holds Google, its largest subsidiary, and several other companies. Some of these companies are subsidiaries of Google, while others are separately owned by Alphabet. As you’ve learned, Google’s ownership structure is complex, with Alphabet Inc. serving as the parent company.
This reportedly sparked a French investigation into Google’s transfer pricing practices in 2012. In the third quarter of 2005, Google reported a 700% increase in profit, largely due to large companies shifting their advertising strategies from newspapers, magazines, and television to the Internet. For the 2006 fiscal year, the company reported $10.492 billion in total advertising revenues and only $112 million in licensing and other revenues. In 2011, 96% of Google’s revenue was derived from its advertising programs. Google generated $50 billion in annual revenue for the first time in 2012, generating $38 billion the previous year. Google’s Internet business was responsible for $10.8 billion of this total, with an increase in the number of users’ clicks on advertisements.
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Both Microsoft and Google (specifically, Google’s parent company, Alphabet Inc.) are publicly traded companies. This means that ownership is distributed among a vast number of shareholders, including institutional investors, mutual funds, and individual retail investors. Neither company has a single controlling shareholder, and their leadership structures are subject to stringent corporate governance regulations.
Who owns 51% of Google?
Traditionally, Google relied on parallel computing on commodity hardware like mainstream x86 computers (similar to home PCs) to keep costs per query low. In 2005, it started developing its own designs, which were only revealed in 2009. In May 2015, Google announced its intention to create its own campus in Hyderabad, India. The new campus, reported to be the company’s largest outside the United States, will accommodate 13,000 employees. In September 2025 Google opened their £735m AI Centre in Waltham Cross, Hertfordshire and announced their plans for £5 bn investment in AI research, in the same month that Alphabet reached market capitalisation of $3 trillion. In 2020, Google said it had overhauled its controversial global tax structure and consolidated all of its intellectual property holdings back to the U.S.
Shareholding Structure of Google
The most prominent institutional shareholders are mutual funds BlackRock and The Vanguard Group, with 2.7% and 3.1%, respectively. We might argue that it is unnatural and that there is data showing that companies with this strange super-voting share underperform their peers. Investors made a deal with the founders and agreed to their super-voting status. Alphabet Inc. is a cash-generating machine, and even though it does not pay dividends, it distributes cash to investors in the form of share buyback.
Alphabet Class B: Top 3 Stockholders
- This article explores the captivating narrative of Page and Brin, from their humble origins to the creation of Google and the enduring global impact they have made.
- Later that month, both Facebook and Alphabet agreed to «cooperate and assist one another» in the face of investigation into their online advertising practices.
- In 2022, during the invasion of Ukraine, a Russian court had ordered Google to restore the channels, with penalties doubling every week according to TASS.
- The largest individual shareholders are Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founders, who still control most of the voting power through special Class B shares.
The company achieved a significant milestone in September 2025 when Alphabet became the fourth company to reach a $3 trillion market valuation, trailing Nvidia, Microsoft, and Apple. Despite increasing competition from AI-powered alternatives, Google maintains its position as the dominant force in online search and digital advertising. But the ownership structure gives outsized voting control to Page, Brin, and certain insiders through Class B shares, which carry more votes per share than the publicly traded classes.
As a publicly traded entity, Alphabet‘s ownership is distributed among a diverse array of stakeholders, including institutional investors such as the Vanguard Group, BlackRock, and Fidelity Management & Research LLC. Notable individuals who hold shares in Alphabet include Sundar Pichai, the CEO, and Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the co-founders. Google LLC is an American multinational technology company that specializes in Internet-related services and products, which includes online advertising technologies, a search engine, cloud computing, software, and hardware.
Top Google Institutional Shareholders
- Google LLC, a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., is a global technology giant known for its diverse range of products and services, including search engines, video sharing, email, navigation, and cloud computing.
- When a company decides to issue equity in the form of common stocks, it can do so in several types depending on the limitations that the owners of the company want to give to voting powers.
- These visionary minds not only transformed information retrieval but laid the foundation for innovations that have shaped the digital era.
- 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.
In August 2024, District of Columbia U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Google held a monopoly in online search and text advertising in violation of Section 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act. On June 27, 2017, the company received a record fine of €2.42 billion from the European Union (EU) for «promoting its own shopping comparison service at the top of search results». On July 18, 2018, the European Commissioner for Competition fined Google €4.34 billion for breaching EU antitrust rules. The abuse of dominants position has been referred to as Google’s constraint applied to Android device manufacturers and network operators to ensure that traffic on Android devices goes to the Google search engine. On October 9, 2018, Google confirmed that it had appealed the fine to the General Court of the EU. On October 31, 2024, the Russian government imposed a «symbolic» fine of $20 decillion on Google for blocking pro-Russian YouTube channels.
Google launched its Google News service in 2002, an automated service which summarizes news articles from various websites. Google also hosts Google Books, which allows users to search books in its database and shows limited previews, or the full book when allowed. Google expanded its search services to include shopping (launched originally as Froogle in 2002), finance (launched 2006), and flights (launched 2011).
While the founders hold the reins, institutional investors own the majority of Alphabet’s shares. These include asset management giants like The Vanguard Group, BlackRock, and Fidelity Investments. Collectively, Page and Brin control over 50% of Alphabet’s voting power, giving them the final say on major decisions, including board appointments, mergers, and acquisitions. Page and Brin hold Class B shares, which carry 10 votes per share, compared to the single vote per share of Class A shares held by the public. This structure ensures that the founders retain significant control over Alphabet’s decisions, even as their ownership stake has decreased over time.
Larry Page served as the first CEO from 1998 until 2001, before handing over the role to Eric Schmidt, who served from 2001 to 2011. Eric Schmidt remained a major figure at the company, later serving as Executive Chairman. When Alphabet was formed, Page took over as CEO of the parent company, with Pichai leading Google. The full transition to Pichai as CEO of both entities occurred in late 2019. These financial institutions each hold between 1.0% and 1.4% of Alphabet’s total shares. While they do not exert control, their voting participation collectively adds to institutional oversight during shareholder meetings.
He also pushed for keeping Google’s home page famously sparse in its design because it would help the page load faster. «The pair’s mission was ‘to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.» With a US$1-million loan from friends and family, the inaugural team moved into a Mountain View office by the start of 2000. In 1999, Page experimented with smaller servers so Google could fit more into each square meter of the third-party warehouses the company rented for their servers. This eventually led to a search engine that ran much faster than Google’s competitors at the time.» Page and Brin used the former’s basic HTML programming skills to set up a simple search page for users, as they did not have a web page developer to create anything visually elaborate.
I also made a deep dive into what companies Alphabet owns and how the whole holding is organized. Google LLC, a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., is a global technology giant known for its diverse range of products and services, including search engines, video sharing, email, navigation, and cloud computing. My expertise in corporate structures, financial markets, and the technology sector allows me to offer insights grounded in first-hand knowledge and a profound understanding of the subject matter. Google LLC is clearly an influential corporate entity that has reshaped the global technology industry. It is no surprise then that it is still owned by a who own google now variety of individuals and institutions, most notably Alphabet Inc., its parent company. Since joining Google, Sundar Pichai has proved to be a pivotal figure in its transformation into one of the most successful technology companies today.
An image recognition technology that allows users to search using their camera. Features include live translation, shopping via visual search, identifying landmarks, plants, animals, and solving homework problems. Google News aggregates news content in personalized feeds, while Discover presents search-like information before users make a query. Launched in 2004, Gmail revolutionized email with generous storage, threading, and powerful search functionality. It now supports smart replies, integrated tasks and calendar, and advanced spam filtering, serving billions of users worldwide.