Where in the World Is Larry Page?

It&#x27;s kind-of Congress&#x27; own fault here. They so often have these... events, that are mostly for show and for the politicians to grandstand making them seem tough to voters but really have very little substance. I doubt any meaningful policy ever comes of them. Doesn&#x27;t everybody know by now that they&#x27;re grilling these CEO&#x27;s in front of the cameras and begging them for money behind the cameras?<p>&quot;outrage&quot; indeed.

From a PR point of view Google has handled this whole privacy debacle very well. By keeping a very low profile on privacy, they’ve made sure Facebook takes the heat. Facebook’s horrendous management of the issue has also allowed Google to slide under the radar on the topic. Generally I think Page is doing the right thing by keeping a low public profile.

&quot;The European Union fined the company $5.1 billion this summer in an antitrust case over the dominance of Google’s Android mobile operating system.&quot;<p>Damn, that&#x27;s sloppy reporting. The EU didn&#x27;t fine Google because of its dominance, rather it was accused of using that dominance in an abusive manner to advance the search&#x2F;ad business [1].<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wsj.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;google-to-be-fined-5-billion-by-eu-in-android-case-1531903470" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wsj.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;google-to-be-fined-5-billion-by...</a>

<i>At this point, though, such a public-relations strategy feels dated. On balance, the celebrity of even the most caricatured CEO (Zuckerberg) appears to be a net positive for his company.</i><p>I disagree totally with that point. The &quot;superstar CEO&quot; Zuckerberg is now ridiculed, hated, and negatively &quot;meme-ed&quot;. He is now the face of censorship (for some) and a laissezfaire strategy threatening democracies (for others).<p>Even the previous paragraph stated: &quot;<i>Bill Gates had become a media caricature during Microsoft Corp.’s three-year antitrust lawsuit</i>&quot;.<p>Page staying in the dark only generated this one article, not a real national scandal. 99% of people don&#x27;t know him and won&#x27;t know him after that no-show. Google&#x27;s reputation is untouched.<p>Only loss is for the Senators not getting the spotlight.

I don’t understand people on here complaining about the Senate demanding that the leaders of a business answer for its actions. Sending your lawyer or an underling is (1) a show of disrespect, (2) it shows you’re not taking responsibility for your company, and (3) when the person answering the questions isn’t really in charge, they can’t answer properly and they can’t commit their companies to behaving differently.<p>People just seem propagandistically pro-Google on here. You’re mostly pretty darn smart people. I don’t get it.

This is why I more or less stopped reading or watching the news. If something is important I will find out. If I want to understand the world better I will either read a book about a given subject, ask someone who knows something, explore it on my own or debate it with someone who holds the opposite view of me.<p>News especially these days is mostly sensationalist gossip made by people who&#x27;s primary incentives is to get you to click their link or share it because you are outraged so they get more clicks.<p>I don&#x27;t mind debating politics or other more problematic subjects but I don&#x27;t get riled up by some article trying to paint the world in black and white, seen the other side of how the media is reporting something too many times.<p>If you want to have another example besides this weird can completely forced article look no further to the Elon Musk interview on Joe Rogan last which made their shares drop 8% for the day because he took one puff. Everyone went berserk because you are not supposed to do something like that if you are the CEO of a large company. Instead of actually listening to the interview which was almost 3 hours and super interesting, that puff became what the media took away from it. The media is no longer in the service of the people it&#x27;s in the service of the clicks that&#x27;s about it because it&#x27;s much more fun to be outraged and gossip than to actually try and understand.<p>Each to their own of course but that&#x27;s why I stopped following the news cycles. Now go and watch that great interview with Elon and while you are at it go watch Peter Thiel on Dave Rubin an equally great show that takes the time to unfold subjects even if that means three hour formats.

Google offered to send someone to the hearing, but the Senate didn&#x27;t feel they were high ranking enough, so they didn&#x27;t let the person fill the seat and let it remain &quot;empty&quot; even though Google offered.<p>Disgraceful grandstanding by Warner.

One thing this article completely neglects to mention: Larry has vocal chord paralysis and so has difficulty speaking.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wired.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;05&#x2F;larry-page-vocal-chords&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wired.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;05&#x2F;larry-page-vocal-chords&#x2F;</a><p>This could have something to do with why he&#x27;s reluctant to do a lot of public speaking nowadays.<p>[UPDATE] I was wrong: the article does mention this, I just missed it. I would delete this comment but I can&#x27;t since it has been replied to.

I&#x27;d wondered about this when I heard Google wasn&#x27;t sending any of their top brass. In my experience, it&#x27;s very out of character for Google&#x27;s top leadership to not predict when people are going to be pissed off about a decision. And it was stupendously easy to tell that Congress would be pissed off by this decision - when I mentioned the news to my wife she was like &quot;You can do that? Just stand up Congress?&quot;<p>I&#x27;m reminded of Margaery Tyrell&#x27;s line from the season 6 finale of Game of Thrones. &quot;Cersei understands the consequences of her absence, and she is absent anyway, which means that she does not intend to suffer those consequences.&quot;<p>Lest we start panicking, I don&#x27;t think that this necessarily means we&#x27;re all going to die in a fireball of wildfyre (though that could happen anyway). But it&#x27;s likely Google actually welcomes regulation, because it will entrench their position and serve as a barrier to any new competitors emerging. They know that neither the average Congressperson nor their constituents understand economics, and so will likely pass legislation that harms Google&#x27;s unborn competitors far more than it harms Google.

I might be missing something here but my thinking is that Google Inc&#x2F;Alphabet is bigger than Larry Page. If for whatever reason he was not able to attend he could have sent a representative chosen from among the senior executives. It seems that neither his attendance nor Google&#x27;s participation in the whole thing was not mandatory

I would feel much better about being a google user if they were standing up strongly for the original &quot;do no evil&quot; ethos. Where is Page indeed? It really seems like the ethical stance has faded away.

&gt; The vision was to stretch this tube system, arced hundreds of feet in the air, from a ground-level entry point on Google’s Mountain View campus to an exit 35 miles north, in San Francisco, so Google’s rainbow-colored beach cruisers might one day be seen flying over U.S. Highway 101. Yes, it sounds like a Hyperloop for bikes.<p>And you&#x27;re telling me this ran into problems!?

Disclosure: I didn&#x27;t fully read the article as it&#x27;s rather dull... &quot;404 - Page not found&quot;, doesn&#x27;t Bloomberg have more <i>niveau</i> than that?<p>It&#x27;s known that Page has problems with his vocal chords. So I wouldn&#x27;t be astonished that he doesn&#x27;t show up for a hearing if he&#x27;s not forced to so.

I like him giving the the middle finger. Why does he have to satisfy a bunch of egomaniac corrupt politician who has been net negative for the society. Why we have to watch in awe of their complete disconnect from current affairs of the society due to their total ignorance?

I don&#x27;t know, if I were a billionaire with a private island in the Caribbean, had paralyzed vocal cords and knew damn well what would happen at the hearing (see Zuckerberg), I&#x27;d also agree with my colleagues that showing up would do no good and that staying on the sidelines would be the best course of action. Why indulge a bunch of bloodthirsty politicians when you can do pretty much anything else please like working on things you love. Bonus: stock won&#x27;t tank if you slip up and say the wrong word.

It is interesting that Larry Page stays out of the spotlight so much. Everyone knows who Mark Zuckerberg is, but many probably couldn&#x27;t tell you who the CEO of Google&#x2F;Alphabet is.

Larry Page probably didn&#x27;t attend the Senate hearings because he knew that this video was going to get leaked:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.breitbart.com&#x2F;tech&#x2F;2018&#x2F;09&#x2F;12&#x2F;leaked-video-google-leaderships-dismayed-reaction-to-trump-election&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.breitbart.com&#x2F;tech&#x2F;2018&#x2F;09&#x2F;12&#x2F;leaked-video-googl...</a><p>He would have been grilled for hours over it.

&gt; “What I didn’t see in the last year was a <i></i>strong central voice<i></i> about how [Google’s] going to operate on these issues that are societal and less technical,”<p>That&#x27;s not careful phrasing when talking about a man with paralysed vocal chords.

I can honestly see him being withdrawn as just not caring or not wanting to be apart of the company or the culture. He shows up every know and then again just to keep his standing. He can reap the financial stability it offers and still work on his moonshots or other pet projects.<p>I know a lot of college buddies who were some of the smartest people I knew. When they hit their 30&#x27;s, they just had enough of the go go go lifestyle and they suddenly wanted to be alone and just enjoy life either by themselves or with a very small group of special friends.<p>I can see Larry being like this. He just wants to be by himself and out of the spotlight.

&gt; Alphabet said in a statement that it had offered its head of global affairs for the hearing and that “enabling Larry to focus on the other bets and long-term technical problems is exactly what Alphabet was set up for.”<p>So basically they had offered someone of authority here, but the politicians wanted to have their show trial with the celebrities instead.

It is interesting they had &quot;GOOGLE&quot; printed on the reserved seat. Where in reality Sundar Pichai is the ceo of Google and Larry Page is the ceo of Alphabet. So the Senate committee was actually expecting Mr. Pichai and Bloomberg got it wrong.

I don&#x27;t see why this would be smart move for Google&#x2F;Larry Page at all. If He goes, either he will fail, which would be disaster similar to Facebook for Google, or he will come out clean, which wouldn&#x27;t change anything. The majority are still going to use google products regardless of public image, so not going best maintains that image.

Who are these guys thinking they can make anyone show up and get grilled by a bunch of politicians looking to score some easy points? That’s offensive. That Dorsey and Sandberg showed up shows that they are desperate for attention or approval. God Bless America where the government can’t force you to waste your valuable time talking to Marco Rubio.

Doing the smart thing and retiring?<p>Theres not much that can be said about communication online. Its going to be terrible, even without VC money thrown at it.<p>This isn&#x27;t hyperbole, its just history - even with the first ever online game, back in the text days, the first griefer existed. In old forums, we had eternal september.<p>Communication online is just hacking the human brain more efficiently.

It was worth reading the fine article just to see this fibbed screenshot of a common error message:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;assets.bwbx.io&#x2F;images&#x2F;users&#x2F;iqjWHBFdfxIU&#x2F;ir0HVqer5h2c&#x2F;v2&#x2F;600x-1.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;assets.bwbx.io&#x2F;images&#x2F;users&#x2F;iqjWHBFdfxIU&#x2F;ir0HVqer5h2...</a><p>&gt; Image text: 404 Page not found

Long before the hearing Google said they would send Kent Walker to answer questions. He was not allowed to attend the hearing, in order to create the stunt of an empty chair.<p>Bloomberg I’m disappointed.

Isn&#x27;t he building Ava robot on his remote island?

Didn&#x27;t know he was missing till now. Maybe he is just doing some heads down work and letter another person take media duties.

What if Google knew through data-mining what the Congress was up to and thus didn&#x27;t send Page to the hearing. ;-)

TLDR<p>&gt; He was also averse to the internal politics common to running a 60,000-employee conglomerate. A former senior director at Google remembers a heated debate among the “L Team,” as Googlers used to call Page’s circle of executive consiglieri, that escalated to a point where it required his mediation. “Can’t you sort this out on your own?” he told his deputies.<p>&gt; The company’s abrupt reorganization in 2015 elevated Pichai to CEO of Google and Page to chief of its umbrella company, Alphabet. It was perhaps the cleverest retirement plan ever devised.

At this rate, I can see Mr. Page being the rich (evil?) guy from the movies that no one ever sees or has heard from in decades, and everyone is scared of. He will pull up in a limousine, slip you a piece of paper (with bad news on it) out of a crack in the window, and drive off again.

In all seriousness he probably didn&#x27;t show because he was offended they&#x27;d make him. He has been a large proponent of perfect data preventing crime and maintaining society and is very cooperative with the IC.

<i>Elon Musk interview on Joe Rogan last which made their shares drop 8% for the day because he took one puff. Everyone went berserk because you are not supposed to do something like that if you are the CEO of a large company.</i><p>The stock dropped because the CAO departed less than a month after starting at Telsa. Not because of the puff of marijuana.

&gt; According to one Larry loyalist, Page’s privacy, besides being a personal preference, is also a carefully considered company strategy.<p>That&#x27;s gold, given the fact that his company has set out to completely destroy the concept of privacy for the rest of the population.

the guy who invented Perl? ..probably trying to figure out what a script he wrote a few years ago actually does ;)

I wonder if he&#x27;s been diagnosed with something that could potentially be terminal if it goes uncured (e.g. aggressive cancer) and he&#x27;s trying to keep it a secret so that Alphabet&#x27;s stock price isn&#x27;t severely damaged<p>EDIT I&#x27;m not sure why this is receiving so many downvotes. Is it that unlikely? I&#x27;m not saying I <i>want</i> him to be sick, it&#x27;s just speculation.

To be fair, the government heavily relies on the data Google collects... I highly doubt the consequences are going to be too dire for them.<p>On the other hand, it does appear as if Google (and many of the other mega-corps) are pretty much acting as if they are sovereign in their own right. In this case, it appears Page honestly just ditched it, but if he gets away with it - he sets a precedent.