Larry Page & Sergey Brin

Page and Brin met at Stanford and built PageRank on the observation that a link is a vote — that the web's own structure could rank it better than keyword counting could. In 1999 they reportedly tried to sell the company to Excite for around $750,000 and were refused. The technical insight was genuine and, on its own, would have made them wealthy rather than dominant.

What made them dominant was two things they were not famous for. The first is the AdWords auction, adopted in 2000: advertisers bid against each other, pay only on clicks, and are ranked by bid multiplied by expected click-through, so a bad ad nobody clicks earns Google nothing. It is a monetisation system that improves the product it monetises, which almost no advertising business can claim. The second is distribution. Google bought Android in 2005 for approximately $50M and YouTube in 2006 for $1.65B, and pays over $20B a year to Apple to remain the Safari default. Google does not merely win the search market; it owns or rents every door into it. A US court ruled in 2024 that this crossed into unlawful monopoly maintenance.

The complication of their record is 2017. Eight Google researchers published the transformer architecture openly, and it became the foundation of every model now attacking Google's core business. Google had comparable capability internally in 2021 and declined to ship it, reportedly out of reputational caution and unwillingness to cannibalise the search result. OpenAI shipped it instead, and both founders were recalled informally to help respond. Page and Brin spent twenty years buying the defaults that made cannibalisation unnecessary. The one time they needed to cannibalise anyway, the habit of protection was too strong.