“The breadth of things that he is taking on is staggering. We have not seen that kind of business leader since Thomas Edison at GE or David Packard at HP.”
— Ben Horowitz, venture capitalist, on Google CEO Larry Page. In a profile of Page, its Businessperson of the Year, Fortune lists the many “moonshots” the company has aimed for under Page’s leadership. They include a pill for detecting cancer, robots, balloons that bring Internet access, and more. The company’s work on self-driving cars have inspired others to hop aboard.
That’s because people believe Google can fulfill its ambitions, Page — who Fortune calls “the most ambitious CEO in the universe” — said recently.
And why do people think it can, think it can? Gargantuan Google has the resources. The company’s core ad business, as well as other businesses such as YouTube, continue to make the company plenty of money. (Its cash hoard as of September is $62 billion.)
“It’s the whole package: the financial results, the reach in terms of what markets they touch, and the ambition,” John Batelle, journalist and author of “The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture,” tells Fortune.
Photo: Google CEO Larry Page closes out the keynote presentation at Google’s annual I/O software conference at San Francisco’s Moscone Center on Wednesday, May 15, 2013. (Karl Mondon/Bay Area News Group)
