Google’s Larry Page, Sergey Brin Lose Combined $60 Billion As Alphabet Stock Drops
ByMary Whitfill Roeloffs,Forbes Staff. Mary Roeloffs is a Forbes breaking news reporter covering pop culture.
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Oct 29, 2026, 11:07am EDT
Oct 29, 2026, 11:34am EDT
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Topline
Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, each among the five richest people in the world, lost a combined $60 billion Thursday morning after shares of parent company Alphabet plunged more than 12% following disappointing third quarter results.
Larry Page, Google co-founder, in 2013.
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Key Facts
Page and Brin held their spots as No. 4 and 5 on Forbes’ real-time billionaires list, but lost $31 billion and $29 billion, respectively, Thursday morning.
The co-founders’ net worths are heavily tied to their equity in Alphabet, which dropped to $283.29 per share from $321.89.
Alphabet’s Q3 earnings report Wednesday showed the company missed Wall Street’s revenue expectations thanks to slower Google Search growth and spent $51.4 billion—roughly 40% of what it brought in—on capital expenditures, mostly for artificial intelligence projects.
Shares of Alphabet are down 10% year to date and the fortunes of Page and Brin have followed, dropping about 8% each since March.
Page and Brin each own about 3% of Alphabet stock as the largest individual shareholders but together maintain a majority voting share.
Key background
Alphabet’s slide follows a quarterly report in which Google Cloud revenue more than doubled to $30.7 billion, but Search revenue rose just 12% to $63.4 billion, slower than the prior two quarters and below the 15% analysts expected. Business Insider reported that free cash flow was negative about $9.1 billion as Alphabet spent heavily on AI infrastructure, a trend that has spooked investors across Big Tech. Meta’s aggressive AI compute investments recently pushed its quarterly free cash flow into negative territory—its first cash burn in over a decade—and its stock fell on the news. Amazon and Oracle have faced comparable pressures, as their multi-billion-dollar commitments to data centers, chips and power infrastructure forced them to tap debt markets and swallow pinched cash margins while waiting for AI projects to turn profitable.
BIG NUMBER
More than $700 billion. That’s how much major U.S. tech companies are expected to spend hyperscaling their AI projects this year. Estimates for 2026 include about $200 billion at Amazon and Alphabet, $190 billion at Microsoft and $130 billion at Meta.
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