Sundar Pichai

Larry Page and Sergey Brin handed Google to Pichai in stages: chief executive of Google in 2015 when Alphabet was created, then of Alphabet itself in 2019, after he had run Chrome, Android and the core products. The staged approach let him prove himself before the founders stepped back. Revenue and profits grew strongly, though critics argue Google moved slowly on AI before catching up, and antitrust rulings against it are part of his record.