Finance

Alphabet's stock surge has made its cofounders richer than anyone except Elon Musk

Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin stand with their arms around one another.
Alphabet cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin trail only Elon Musk in wealth gain this year. James Leynse/Corbis via Getty Images
Read in app

The "Google Guys" are now richer than Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Oracle's Larry Ellison, and Meta's Mark Zuckerberg.

Alphabet's cofounders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, are worth $265 billion and $246 billion each as of Monday's close, per the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. They're the second- and third-richest people on the planet, behind only Elon Musk and his $638 billion net worth.

Page and Brin have added $97 billion and $88 billion to their respective fortunes since the start of January, for a joint wealth gain of $185 billion, the rich list shows. Ellison and Nvidia's Jensen Huang trail them by some distance, with wealth increases of $46 billion and $39 billion, respectively.

Page and Brin are worth a combined $511 billion — much more than some of the most valuable S&P 500 companies, including Exxon Mobil, Bank of America, and Netflix. Combined, they remain $127 behind Musk.

The pair have seen a huge swing in their fortunes since late July, when they ranked sixth and seventh on Bloomberg's list with sub-$175 billion net worths, and year-to-date gains of under $5 billion each.

Less than five months later, they're each more than $85 billion richer. That's because Alphabet stock has surged by over 50% since mid-August, from $200 to record highs of over $300 in recent weeks.

Page and Brin each own about 6% of the Alphabet, which has a $3.7 trillion market value and counts Google, YouTube, Waymo, and DeepMind among its subsidiaries.

Warm praise for Google's new AI model, Gemini 3, has reignited investors' hopes that Alphabet can beat out rivals, including OpenAI, to become a dominant force in AI.

Alphabet has also benefited from fading antitrust concerns, a huge deal with Anthropic, and broader buzz around AI companies that has boosted their stock prices and enriched key shareholders such as Page and Brin, even as concerns that the boom is a bubble have grown.

Read next

Theron Mohamed — Profile Picture
Theron Mohamed
Theron Mohamed is a London-based correspondent on the International team at Business Insider. His coverage spans finance, investing, wealth, markets, and the economy.Theron joined BI in 2019 as a reporter at Markets Insider and rose to the rank of correspondent before moving to the Trending team then the broader International team. He previously covered tech, media, and telecom stocks for Investors Chronicle magazine and had a brief stint on the Financial Times' Data team. He interned at the Wall Street Journal in New York where he primarily wrote for Heard on the Street.Theron has freelanced for The Independent, The Telegraph, WIRED, and several smaller publications. He holds an undergraduate degree in geography from the London School of Economics, and a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University.Theron often covers Warren Buffett, Michael Burry, and other elite investors. He also writes about the world's wealthiest people and shares financial advice from all manner of rich and successful people.Email Theron at tmohamed@jkmperu.com and follow him on X @theron_mohamed.