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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.

39 of 339 comments (clear)

  1. They will still control Google by linuxgurugamer · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Even if they have less than 50%, if they have the largest block then in all likelyhood they will still retain control.

    1. Re:They will still control Google by nurb432 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Only on paper. The other 50+ % could tell them to take a hike, as they change Google's direction into uncharted, less 'friendly' territories.

      The wind of change is coming, hide your data.

      --
      ---- Booth was a patriot ----
    2. Re:They will still control Google by Dr.+Spork · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Also, since Eric Schmidt isn't selling his shares, the three of them together will have far more than 50% of the voting shares. (reference)

    3. Re:They will still control Google by wytcld · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Yeah. Anything more than 30% (or less) is sufficient to control a large public corporation. The majority of stock in a corporation like Google is held by mutual funds, who do not typically actively engage in corporate control. So 30% is more than 60% of the stock held by individuals, who are more likely to claim a voice in corporate governance. IOW, they're keeping total control, for all practical purposes.

      --
      "with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
    4. Re:They will still control Google by Bender+Unit+22 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It's the internet, you can't take your data back again, only pollute it.

    5. Re:They will still control Google by phantomfive · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Except they still have most of their wealth in Google stock. More likely they just want some money. Bill Gates did the same thing when he started his charitable organization, so maybe they are planning on starting a charity. Or maybe they want to buy some islands somewhere. Or a small country.

      Since they are cashing out together, it seems they have some joint project they want to work on. Maybe something to do with censorship in China? A several billion dollar advertising campaign could do something maybe.

      --
      Qxe4
    6. Re:They will still control Google by Jay+L · · Score: 3, Insightful

      This is their signal that they think it's over.

      No, this is their signal that they wouldn't mind having $5.5 billion dollars around that doesn't depend on Google.

    7. Re:They will still control Google by mindstrm · · Score: 3, Insightful

      It is? Perhaps it's just smart financial strategy? It's called taking profits. Their SEC requires them, along with pretty much every other insider, to file their stock selling plans ahead of time. They can't just buy & sell google stock like you and I can at a whim.

    8. Re:They will still control Google by derGoldstein · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You mean Mr. "If You Have Something You Don't Want Anyone To Know, Maybe You Shouldn't Be Doing It"? Sure, I'll sleep soundly tonight.

      He stayed on Apple's board long after he knew about the Android move, and he's usually the one pushing the "it's technically not illegal" line. I don't see that he's the best person anyone would like to leave their data with. IMO, prepare for more Facebook-esque pranks from Google in the near future.

      --
      Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a bug, it's a feature.
    9. Re:They will still control Google by Anpheus · · Score: 3, Informative

      He said if you don't want Google to know something, don't tell it to Google. Which is an entirely different matter. Basically, as a US corporation they fall under US laws including ones that allow the government to subpoena them and other things. Now they've resisted every request for information, but if a judge says they have to fork it over, they have to do it.

      So don't tell Google information you want to remain private. It's that easy.

    10. Re:They will still control Google by RealTime · · Score: 3, Informative

      Nope. One Class B share becomes one Class A share. The voting strength decreases from 10 votes per share (Class B) to 1 vote per share (Class A). All of the early Google option grants (not just the shares owned by the founders) are Class B. One of the conditions in the option grants of Class B shares is that they cannot be sold without first being converted to Class A shares.

      --

      Yesterday it worked; today it is not working; Windows is like that...

  2. Why do I care about Google contributing to SS? by solafide · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Why do I care about Google contributing to SS? by wizardforce · · Score: 5, Insightful

      These two will probably never see a penny from Social Security, even if they were contributing now.

      As a 23 yr old, neither will I.

      --
      Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
    2. Re:Why do I care about Google contributing to SS? by jmauro · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Did you actually read what he said? It's not "Social Security and Medicare", it's just Medicare. And only Medicare.

      And this is because our health care system has such screwed up incentives the costs are spiralling out of control system wide which is driving up the Medicare costs to levels that cannot be supported.

      Since our government simply refuses to do anything to get the situation under control it'll what bankrupt us, not Social Security which has been 40 years away from bankruptcy for like the last 50 years (and even if and when the trust fund empties it'll be able to provide along the lines of 90% of the promised benefits).

      They're being lumped together for partisan, idological reasons that have nothing to do with the fiscal stability of Social Security.

    3. Re:Why do I care about Google contributing to SS? by sunking2 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I don't care so much about SS. It's capped anyway, and to within a hand grenades throw you pretty much take out only what you put in.

      However, what I don't agree with is them taking $1 and for the most part dodging an income tax. They aren't doing it to save jobs, like the CEO of Vale or Aspen or one of those who did the same thing. For these guys its all PR. The company can afford to pay them. And should. Instead it pays less taxes on that money than if it were on a personal income. All of the things that you and me pay for they are getting for free, or at a lower rate because they have the ability to be compensated in ways that have lower tax rates. It's good to know these guys have policemen and firemen protecting their millions in assets for free. It's good to know that the fighter jets that will protect them from the Chinese were not funded at all by these bozos (yes, a bit of tongue in cheek there but you get the point). These guys are dodging their civic duties for good PR and nothing more.

      What they should do is take hte salary and contrinute 100% of it to the national debt, or other charity.

    4. Re:Why do I care about Google contributing to SS? by Jacked · · Score: 3, Insightful

      And I think you should contribute 100% of your wages to me! In other words, it really doesn't matter what you think they should do with their money. It's theirs, not yours.

      But seriously, they aren't exactly getting a free ride in regards to public services such as police and fire departments. You have to keep in mind that Google employs tens of thousands of people. People that are earning high wages and paying lots of taxes. So, the founders are paying lots of taxes indirectly by employing thousands of people.

      Besides, they may only be taking $1 annual salaries, but that doesn't mean they have no income. I'm sure they have very high incomes, from sale of stock, from investments, etc. And on those items they have to pay income or capital gains taxes. And, I'm sure that whatever taxes they have paid, plus the taxes they will end up paying on the upcoming stock sales, will completely dwarf any that you or I will pay over the course of our entire lifetimes.

  3. Major Cash Flow!!! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    I think China should buy all these shares, then they wouldn't need to hack anything!

  4. Will this mean there's no "vision" at Google? by ifwm · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  5. The SS/Medicare comment is pointless by Just+Brew+It! · · Score: 4, Informative

    The profits from selling of their shares will be considered income by the IRS, and taxed accordingly.

    1. Re:The SS/Medicare comment is pointless by nodwick · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Except that money from capital gains are not subject to either Social Security or Medicare. Taxes for those programs are deducted from employment income, not investment income. Furthermore, capital gains tax rates are significantly lower than those for ordinary income - currently the former is capped at 15%, while the latter is 39%. Not a knock on the Google founders specifically, but rather on the wealthy in general - as Warren Buffet has pointed out, our tax system is skewed so that wealthy folks like himself pay an effective tax rate of 17.7%, while his secretary is taxed at 30%.

    2. Re:The SS/Medicare comment is pointless by Temujin_12 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      ...as Warren Buffet has pointed out, our tax system is skewed so that wealthy folks like himself pay an effective tax rate of 17.7%, while his secretary is taxed at 30%.

      Can someone please tell me why we just don't move to a simple flat tax rate? You make minimum wage? You pay X%. You're lower middle class? You pay the same X%. You're upper class? You pay the sam X%. You're the CEO of a fortune 500 company? You pay the same X%.

      This way politicians would have to upset everyone in order to raise taxes and couldn't single out certain groups based on which one is most likely to put up with it (or is unable to vote them out). If they want/need to increase taxes, it must affect ALL of their constituents.

      Also, as long as what is taxed is clearly defined, it makes tax codes a LOT simpler. Easier job for the IRS, accountants, employers, and employees.

      --
      Faith is a willingness to accept something w/o complete proof and to act on it. Reason allows you to correct that faith.
    3. Re:The SS/Medicare comment is pointless by Trepidity · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Well, it depends on what you mean by "a flat tax". People pushing the flat tax, like Steve Forbes, have typically been pushing for a flat tax on wage and salary income, but that excludes capital gains entirely. One flat tax of x% for the working schmucks, and another flat tax of 0% for the trust-fund kids like Steve Forbes.

      If it were a flat tax that included capital gains, that might have a better chance of going somewhere, but the major flat-tax proponents have not been pushing that. Though even in that case you would have a bunch of entrenched popular deductions that people would try to pull in, like the mortgage-interest deduction, the deduction on money donated to charity, etc.

    4. Re:The SS/Medicare comment is pointless by Conception · · Score: 4, Insightful

      One reason is a flat tax, just as sales tax, has a more significant impact on the poor. If the tax rate is 10% and you make $100 a weak, the difference between 100 and 90 is pretty significant. If you make 10,000 a weak, the different between 9000 and 10,000 is far less significant. So, a flat tax is "fair" but only from a certain set of principles.

    5. Re:The SS/Medicare comment is pointless by bnenning · · Score: 4, Informative

      Um, no.

      In 2007, the top 1 percent of tax returns paid 40.4 percent of all federal individual income taxes and earned 22.8 percent of adjusted gross income.

      --
      How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
    6. Re:The SS/Medicare comment is pointless by PCM2 · · Score: 3, Informative

      Until Bush's tax cuts expire later this year and Obama doesn't renew them and then NOBODY invests in the stock market because the risk just isn't worth it when 35% of your investment gains are taken away.

      I trust Warren Buffet's insight more than I trust yours:

      I've been around rich people all my life. And I have seen capital gains taxes close to 40 percent. No one went home at 3 in the afternoon and said, "I've worked enough, and because tax rates are so high, I think I'll go to the movies." I mean, people want to maximize their after tax income, and there's two ways to do it: Increase their income, or get Congress to lower the tax rates for them. But I have never seen anybody with capital say, "I'm going on strike. I won't invest." I've been managing capital for 50 years for other people. No one left and said, you know, "The taxation system's too tough. I think I'll just stick it all under my mattress." They can't stick under their mattress. They're going to invest their money regardless.

      --
      Breakfast served all day!
    7. Re:The SS/Medicare comment is pointless by PCM2 · · Score: 3, Informative

      Buffet is a guilty dipshit, he feels bad for being rich. He's also stupid, I don't care how rich he is.

      Class A shares in Berkshire Hathaway (Warren Buffet's investment firm) trade for $105,000 apiece. That's 190 times the price of a share of Google stock. I don't care how rich they are, nobody gives that kind of money to someone stupid.

      --
      Breakfast served all day!
  6. Re:BFD by sopssa · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  7. Re:BFD by Hal_Porter · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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;
  8. Holy crap! by EnsilZah · · Score: 3, Funny

    They're liquidating their assets and moving to their moonbase!

  9. Re:Escape before they go Enron crazy! by groslyunderpaid · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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....

  10. Re:BFD by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  11. Better Link by beakerMeep · · Score: 3, Informative

    Android makes impressive gains in Q4

    They went from 1% to 16% in a year.

    --
    meep
  12. Re:BFD by Tibor+the+Hun · · Score: 3, Funny

    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.
  13. Face by zogger · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  14. I smell a Rat by Avalon's_Avatar · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Trouble in China followed by the two principals cashing in stock? Something's going down.

  15. The wave has crested by dave562 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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?

  16. Re:It is about time by Dilligent · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  17. Re:It is about time by Nebulious · · Score: 5, Insightful

    YEAH! Google should be all about the short term and next quarter's profits! That's how our economy's so strong today!

  18. SEC filing does not = selling by cenc · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.