I started as The New York Times’s Google beat reporter in August 2014. Shortly thereafter, I told the company’s public relations people that at some point I would love to interview Larry Page, the company’s co-founder. I’ve been waiting ever since.
Mr. Page is a fascinating character who has changed the world a few times over and is worth tens of billions of dollars. But he makes little time for the press. He rarely grants interviews, and, when he does, they are usually limited to staged events like TED
That presented a big hurdle while I reported on a profile of Mr. Page for Sunday’s paper. He declined several requests for comment on my article, as did a good number of past and present Google employees who have worked closely with him.
Before we go any further, I want to say loud and clear that I don’t think Mr. Page or any other business leader has a responsibility to talk to the press. He is a busy man and his media shyness probably should not be confused with reclusion. Mr. Page is visible at Google’s Mountain View, Calif., campus and regularly talks to the company’s 60,000 employees there and around the world (via videoconference), during the company’s weekly T.G.I.F. gatherings.
But companies are run by people, so it is extremely difficult to understand Google without understanding Mr. Page. If you can’t talk to the man himself, the next best thing is to talk to people who have worked with him.
As I reported the story, two things kept surfacing. The first was that a number of recently departed Googlers told me that after they gave notice, Mr. Page personally asked them to stay. They said that, during these conversations, he honestly laid out his concerns and aspirations for the company and its future.
The second thing was that as I reported the profile — as well as other technology stories — I kept meeting scientists and other researchers who had bumped into Mr. Page at Google’s various academic and scientific gatherings.
What these groups had in common was candor. They provided a glimpse, though narrow, into how Mr. Page thinks about technology and Google, which recently reorganized into a holding company called Alphabet. The profile I wrote was hardly an expose, but it helped me — and therefore helped Times readers — get a better understanding about Mr. Page and his company, which has moved far beyond search into self-driving cars, space travel and biotechnology, among other areas.
Whenever someone asks me what I do at The Times, and I tell them I cover Google, the result is often a confused stare. “That’s it?”
Not really. Our technology group tends to work thematically, meaning that we try to focus on how tech is changing our readers’ work and personal lives. Google is the main focus of my reporting, and it is a brutally competitive beat. It takes me an hour to go through the day’s headlines each morning, and there are dozens of competitors and talented journalists on the tech beat. That means I’m often scooped, and the scrum of daily news can make it hard to see the bigger picture.
It’s worth it, though. There’s a strong argument that Google is now the most important company in the world. It is worth $500 billion and is neck and neck with Apple as the most valuable company by market capitalization. Six Google products have more than one billion users. I use Google to research stories, I email my editors through Gmail, and I use Google Maps to go to meetings.
Google’s power is unparalleled and partly explains why it and other giant technology companies have faced a bit of cultural backlash in the wake of Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who leaked documents about government spying.
Google’s omnipresence is such that it is often hard for me to get away from work. For example, a few weeks after Mr. Page announced the formation of Alphabet, the author Jonathan Franzen published “Purity,” his fifth novel. I read the book for fun, but, as often happens on the Google beat, it quickly turned into work.
One of the main characters in Mr. Franzen’s novel is Andreas Wolf, a hacker who has exposed secrets about the East German Stasi and the United States nuclear arsenal, but, during one fictional exchange, refused to publish leaks from two Google employees for fear that the company might use its search engine to tar Mr. Wolf’s reputation.
I emailed Mr. Franzen, via a publicist, to see if he might be willing to tell me what kinds of real-world concerns led to that imaginary exchange.
“That paragraph came out of the distance between what the N.S.A. was collecting in terms of metadata, basically the Snowden leak, a relatively paltry amount of data compared to the rather large amounts of data we are willingly giving up — or unwillingly giving up by clicking the ‘I accept the terms box’ — to these very powerful corporations,” he said in a phone interview. “And my feeling is, you look around at who is powerful in the world now, and, yes the U.S. government still has drones and a nuclear arsenal — it has some might — but in terms of power over people’s daily lives, I think it’s shifted to the private sector.”
Later, he added: “I think it’s appropriate always to resist concentration of power in the hands of too few. There is bound to come a point where that becomes dangerous.”
Google’s power is predicated, of course, on the enormous volume of information at its disposal. Its competitors, as I noted in my profile, have accused the company of abusing its dominance in the search space to steer consumers to Google services over theirs, and the European Commission seems to agree.
But Mr. Page has also used his own power — through an unusual share structure, he and co-founder Sergey Brin control the company outright — to isolate himself from Wall Street’s demands. In the 16 years I’ve been covering business I have met countless C.E.O.s who describe their jobs in almost academic terms, using phrases like “fiduciary duty” to dodge questions about what kind of role their company has to society.
In public comments, Mr. Page goes out of his way to say the opposite, describing Google more in terms of a nonprofit than a gigantic corporation. During a 2014 interview with Charlie Rose, he said he wished there were a vehicle for people to donate money to their company so that it could be used for projects that had some kind of social purpose.
These are some of the ideas I tried to get at in the article, but of course I would love to have included an interview with the man himself. There is a popular image of reporters as a pack of pushy cold callers who will stalk anyone to get their story, and while that is true at times, I can tell you from experience that it is really awkward and emasculating to try to interview someone who doesn’t want to talk. You feel like a big dork.
In total, I have encountered Mr. Page three times for a total of five minutes or so. Once was at an off-the-record gathering where nothing interesting happened, and another was at a press event where he politely shook my hand before heading in another direction.
The other time, I was at Google’s Mountain View campus, talking to an executive, when Mr. Page rode up on his bike to say hello to his employee. I introduced myself as a New York Times reporter and he immediately pedaled away.
“That went well,” the executive said.
It’s not always the most flattering work, but I do believe it’s important.
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