Who will control Alphabet once Sergey Brin and Larry Page are gone?

“YEAH, OK, WHY not? I’ll just give it a try.” With those words Sergey Brin abandoned academia and poured his energy into Google, a new firm he had dreamed up with a friend, Larry Page. Incorporated in 1998, it developed PageRank, a way of cataloguing the burgeoning world wide web. Some 21 years on, Messrs Brin and Page are retiring from a giant that dominates the search business. Alphabet, as their firm is now known, is the world’s fourth-most-valuable listed company (see article), worth $910bn. In spite of its conspicuous success, they leave it facing three uncomfortable questions—about its strategy, its role in society and who is really in control.

Silicon Valley has always featured entrepreneurs making giant leaps. Even by those standards Google jumped far, fast. From the start its search engine enjoyed a virtuous circle—the more people use it and the more data it collects, the more useful it becomes. The business model, in which advertisers pay to get the attention of users around the world, has printed money. It took Google just eight years to reach $10bn in annual sales. Its peak cumulative losses were $21m. By comparison, Uber has incinerated $15bn and still loses money.