Together, Page and Brin own about 14% of the publicly-listed shares and control 56% of the stockholder voting power through super-voting stock.
If anything they are supporters (and more likely, originators) of some of the changes that have been occurring over the last couple of years, including layoffs and other things people describe as “decline”.
Or they decided that they don't care too much and focus on their fun projects.
Or something in between.
From a governance point of view, they’re both on the Board of Directors: http://abc.xyz/investor/board-and-governance
Do you want to go back to work to make the worlds most profitable ad tech company "cool" again?
Page and Brin wanted to organize the world’s info. I think they accomplished that and I suspect the googleplex can answer all their questions.
Of course he has turned to politics, just not in the conventional way - he's not a native US citizen, so he can't do a Trump and run for President. Instead he's messing around with Twitter by allowing the far-right to run completely rampant on it.
It appears to me that he has absolutely turned to politics, if you look at his tweets, they are almost entirely political these days.
He wanted to buy Twitter purely for political reasons, and said as much.
I’d also argue he technically is investing, given all of the companies he’s starting, even OpenAI started from his investment. There’s Neuralink, Boring Company, and probably others. Though in Musk’s case it might be his autism/adhd.
Elon Musk fits that to a T: he was the richest dude on the planet by far, with not just one but three wildly successful companies under his belt as either founder or at least very significant investor (I'm not interested in the usual "Musk didn't found Tesla" debate), more women, wives, affairs and kids than most people will ever have had, being wildly beloved by progressives for kicking the legacy car industry so hard in their butts that they haven't recovered to this date, and being beloved by the "fiscal conservative" crowd as well for pulverizing the Boeing/ULA monopoly on spaceflight.
Normal wealthy people would be perfectly content at that point - they'd live out their days on some yacht with a better wine chamber than many 5-star restaurants, do a bit of gambling here, a bit of charity fundraising there, that kind of stuff. But not Elon Musk, he goes and blows dozens of billions of dollars of his own and Saudi oil sheikh money to buy Twitter, a failing social media platform. Just WTF?
Being some kind of passionless drone that can't imagine anything greater in life than some kind of decadent "access to all the finest things in the world" is really not aligned with the hacker mindset. I think I speak for many here when I say that if I were fabulously wealthy, I'd just be hacking things on a much larger scale.
No one can possibly say this with full absolute certainty, the same way no one truly knows how they'll act in the face of (or aftermath of) parenthood, poverty, war, death, illness, etc.
One doesn't end up at Brin levels of wealth without some part of their psyche changing.
They achieved what they initially wanted, and left Google closer to its peak. At some point, you want to move on. Especially when you quit as a winner, and now you can relax or deal with more fun and interesting ventures.
Coming in to save a company in a decline is not as fun and satisfying as creating something new and awesome from scratch. Especially when you’ve made enough to not have to worry about it ever, so that you can afford to only pursue things that are fun for you.
Plus, “decline” of Google is relative. Sure, they have not a good reputation anymore, and they do not push out new and exciting products that kill it in the market. But guess what? The share price isn’t tanking, so from the perspective of Sergei and Larry (who are still significant shareholders), that decline isn’t hitting them much.
Look at IBM. They’ve been dead in the eyes of the tech industry as an innovator and a success story for the longest time. Their Watson for medical applications is mostly considered to be somewhere between a failure and a scam. However, their share price is doing just fine.
That there's something wrong with Google that needs fixing. that its founders are,or feel, responsible for fixing it. That they are allowed or capable of fixing it. That they can or should be bothered. That a large company of 175k people can be "magical". That any two hacker news folks will agree on what "magical" is or feels like :-)
I think the turning point was the Google+ failure. It was perhaps the first major initiative at Google that was not engineering led, and when it failed, it seems like the shift began in earnest to restructure the company for top down initiatives, led by business instead of engineering.
Google+ indeed happened under Page's leadership, so I agree with you that this is where it fell off the rails, but I think you have the reason backwards.
(And to be clear, I don't think that's a personal failing. I don't think I'd do any better in his place! But I think knowing your own limits is very important, and knowing that I'd be a terrible megacorp CEO is part of that.)