Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin join the centibillionaires club

Surging tech stocks recently made Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin the lastest members of the centibillionaires club - an exclusive group of billionaires, each member having a net worth of $100 billion and more. 

Page is worth $103.6 billion, while Brin is worth $100.2 billion,reports the Entrepreneur citing estimates by Bloomberg's Billionaire Index.

Until Larry Page and Sergey Brin joining the  centibillionaires last week, the small group of world's ultra rich only had 6 memebrs in it -  Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gate, LVMH CEO Bernard Arnault, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett.

The world's eight richest people together hold fortunes of more than $1 trillion and have added $110 billion combined this year.

According to Bloomberg's calculations Brin's fortune grew by $20.4 billion in the year to April 2021, while Page's rose by $21.2 billion. Tech shares have risen rapidly since the start of the pandemic, and those in Google's parent company, Alphabet, have grown by more than 80% over the past year.

Page and Brin own controlling shares in Alphabet, with more than 50% of the total votes between them. The company brought in $46.43 billion in revenue for the fourth quarter of 2020, minus traffic acquisition costs, up from $37.57 billion a year ago. Alphabet credited this to people using YouTube and Google Search more during the pandemic.

Page and Brin started working on Google in 1996 while they were PhD students at Stanford University alongside an unofficial "third founder," who left before it became a company. In 2015, the pair founded holding company Alphabet to manage both Google and various other subsidiaries, including Waymo, DeepMind, and Sidewalk Labs. Brin became the president of the new company and Page became its CEO. Page appointed Sundar Pichai to take over as CEO of Google. in 2015. Page and Brin took annual salary of $1 per year during their time at Google.

Presently Google is the most-used website in the world. 

They  announced plans to step back from Alphabet in 2019, and appointed Pichai as CEO. The duo also led an investment round of $40 million in Elon Musk's Tesla in 2006.