Sergey Brin rolls into work on skates, while colleague Larry Page tinkers with a £77,000 electric sports car. Mark Zuckerberg, meanwhile, waves around a fencing foil when he gets excited.
These are the unconventional billionaires behind the two biggest companies in cyberspace – and they are going to war. Google and Facebook are gearing up for a high-tech battle for our digital lives.
How we search the web, how we shop online and how we communicate in the years ahead will be decided by three geeks with a history of riding roughshod over customers’ privacy.
At 37, Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page are internet veterans. Worth an estimated $15 billion (£9.6 billion) each, they rule an empire that employs 23,000 people and processes a billion search requests every day.
The pair enjoy vintage wines and even have a Boeing 767 ‘party aircraft' kitted out with hammocks, king- size beds and showers.
One person unlikely to get a boarding pass is baby-faced Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg. The 26-year-old may only be worth a paltry $7 billion (£4.5 billion), but he has a community of 500 million users. His first Facebook business card reads: ‘I’m CEO, bitch!’
‘They’re egotistical and young for the amount of money, power and prestige they have,’ says a source. ‘Along with their success comes a certain amount of arrogance.’
Stories of their exploits echo around Silicon Valley in California. They include Zuckerberg turning up late for a meeting with venture capitalists and still wearing his pyjamas. He is also said to have turned down the chance to meet the Queen because ‘I don’t have time for these things’.
All three entrepreneurs cultivate the laid-back, anti-authoritarian image of their student years, when they first formed their companies. Brin and Page earn a symbolic $1 a year from Google – and Brin is still officially on leave from his Stanford University PhD studies.
In the early days of Facebook, Brin would hang out at its scruffy office in Palo Alto, California, sitting on a mattress because there were not enough chairs.
‘The Google guys thought Mark was special and smart from a really early time. They showed him respect,’ says a source. ‘But there has been less interaction between them as the companies have become more competitive. It comes down to ego: they’re all people who really want to win.’
Now that their projects have grown into multinational companies, the founders of Google and Facebook are finding that even cyberspace isn’t big enough for the both of them. Page and Brin are angry that Facebook has made it difficult for users to transfer digital contacts out of Facebook. They’re planning Google’s own, more open social network.
Meanwhile, Zuckerberg is starting a search site with social features, and will soon launch a competitor to Google’s email service.
Google is still the bigger company but Silicon Valley is awash with rumours that many of its software engineers are ‘running through the door’ to join Facebook. And experts fear that online sniping might develop into a fully-fledged cyber war.
‘Page and Brin believe machines are better at making sense of the world’s information than human beings,’ says Sarah Lacy, author of Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good, a book about Silicon Valley.
‘Facebook at its core is a really social company. Zuckerberg has the view that social connections can make daily life more efficient.’
Neither company is a stranger to controversy, particularly when it comes to the privacy issues. For instance, Google keeps records of internet searches for more than a year.
But it was when it started poking its nose into people’s windows that the backlash began. Google Street View is a project to map the world’s cities by taking millions of digital photos from cars at street level. When the site launched in Britain, it showed people entering adult bookshops, a man vomiting in the street and someone being arrested.
In the village of Broughton, near Milton Keynes, residents formed a human barrier to stop a Google Street View car snapping their homes.
For his part, Zuckerberg – or Zuck to his friends – has been in trouble for violating privacy rules ever since creating his first website, Facemash, while at Harvard University.
In 2003, he hacked into Harvard’s computers, downloaded images of female students and invited classmates to rate their looks. Facemash was swiftly shut down by university chiefs and Zuckerberg narrowly escaped expulsion.
Three months later, Facebook was born, and Zuckerberg was on the road to becoming the world’s youngest self-made billionaire.
His days at Harvard were recently given the glossy Hollywood treatment, though his real life is more prosaic.
‘Mark is very shy, almost socially inept. As you speak to him, he’ll put his hands to his mouth to cover it, start stroking his head and twitch nervously,’ says one Silicon Valley insider.
In the film The Social Network, Zuckerberg is accused by fellow students of stealing the idea for Facebook. He settled the case by handing over tens of millions of dollars and a million Facebook shares.
As the company expanded, its problems with private data grew. In 2007, Facebook launched an advertising service called Beacon, which automatically posted details of people’s online purchases and film rentals to their Facebook page – spoiling surprise gifts and embarrassing thousands.
Then last year, Facebook changed its privacy terms to give it permanent legal ownership of all the words, photos and video clips that users had uploaded. After thousands of protests – and a federal complaint in America – the company finally backed down.
The latest controversy, just weeks ago, involved Facebook transmitting information about tens of millions of people to outside companies. Some then sold the data on to advertisers.
Ironically, Zuckerberg is an intensely private person. ‘He’s never sought the limelight and doesn’t want to be a big celebrity,’ says author Sarah Lacy.
Despite his immense riches, Zuckerberg remains stuck in the lifestyle of a computer science student. He listens to Lady Gaga and U2, loves Gladiator and The Matrix movies, and reads sci-fi books. He rents a modest detached house in Palo Alto, about half a mile from Facebook’s offices, and drives a five-year-old Honda Acura.
He generally gets up at 10am, pulls on a T-shirt, jeans and trainers and strolls to work, eyes glued to his iPhone.
On Friday afternoons, says a source, ‘he and some Facebook buddies – all millionaires themselves – will drive to a student dive bar. There’s sawdust and peanut shells on the floor, and a pitcher of beer costs ten bucks.’
A big night out might involve Zuck and long-time girlfriend Priscilla Chan queuing for a $15 all-you-can-eat buffet at a popular Mexican restaurant.
Google’s Brin also has some strange traits. He and his wife Anne were married in 2007 in his-and-hers swimsuits on Musha Cay, David Copperfield’s private island in the Bahamas. All guests had to swim to an isolated sandbar for the ceremony.
Brin often arrives at conferences in a T-shirt and jeans with holes in them, although since marrying, both Google founders have started to dip into their fortunes. ‘They have pretty modest lifestyles but not as modest as they used to be,’ says author Richard Brandt. ‘They will splurge.’
Brin’s wife recently founded 23andme, a company that offers DNA testing for people interested in their ancestry or genetic health. Brin was shocked to discover he had inherited a mutated gene that increases his chance of developing Parkinson’s disease by a factor of 50.
He has since given $50 million towards finding a cure for the debilitating condition.
Google itself is a philanthropic powerhouse – its charitable arm Google.org has doled out more than $110 million, mainly supporting high-tech projects in clean energy and providing computers for the poor. In September, Zuckerberg gave $100 million to launch a foundation to help public schools in New Jersey.
But Google doesn’t just outgun Facebook when it comes to charity. As well as their Boeing 767, Page and Brin own two corporate aircraft and a Dornier Alpha light attack jet. The 600mph two-seater is kept at a Nasa airfield near Palo Alto where it is used for ‘scientific research’ – and presumably buzzing Facebook’s HQ nearby.
Page and Brin each own ‘at least one’ electric Tesla Roadster sports car. ‘They like them because it suits their taste of being environmentally conscious, they’re really cool and they can pay cash for them,’ says Richard Brandt.
Page is reported to be shopping for one of the first all-electric aircraft.
Charity and environmental work are all part of their famous Don’t Be Evil motto for Google. But a source says they now regret their choice of words: ‘If they had to do that over again, they never would have made that slogan. It’s come back to bite them so many times.’
Zuckerberg, on the other hand, has no motivation beyond building his business. ‘I don’t think Mark is setting out to do anything evil,’ says Sarah Lacy, ‘but he’s never taken the moral high ground.’
The rivalry between Google and Facebook has been boiling for years. Google experimented with a social network at the same time as Facebook launched in 2004.
While Facebook went on to conquer the world, Google’s Orkut, named after a Turkish staff member, fizzled out.
Page and Brin then tried to buy their way into Facebook’s success but in 2007, Zuckerberg accepted a multi-million-dollar investment from Google’s arch-rival, Microsoft, instead.
Now, says a Silicon Valley insider, ‘Page and Brin are scared of Facebook – you can see that in everything Google is doing.’
In 2009, Google launched Wave, a social messaging system that confused more people than it attracted (it is now closed). And earlier this year, Page and Brin mashed up Facebook and Twitter to produce Buzz, a service that adds social features to Google’s popular Gmail site.
However, the only buzz that Buzz generated were angry complaints about the way the site automatically published details of users’ most frequent contacts. Google had to settle a privacy lawsuit against Buzz for $8.5 million.
‘Brin and Page are just not good at social media,’ says a former associate. Even Brin admits Google chiefs lack the ‘emotional intelligence’ to understand its users.
Both companies see the coming war as a clash of philosophies. Google wants all the information in the world to be freely available – and sponsored by its advertisers.
Facebook wants to replace Google’s services with recommendations, searches and news tailored to users’interests and sourced from their own friends – but with
Facebook’s commercials.
Google calls Facebook ‘a data dead-end’ and accuses Zuckerberg of ‘trapping his users’ contact information’. Facebook thinks Google’s search page is old-fashioned and secretive.
‘Facebook is defined by your friends, not by some secret computer algorithm,’ sneers a source.
Facebook is teaming up with Microsoft to add friends’ suggestions to web searches,
Critics and celebrities reveal the mean, moody and magnificent tales that kept them riveted and is about to roll out a new, high-speed messaging service that Zuckerberg hopes will leave Gmail in the dust.
Google,on the other hand, is planning Facebook-busting social layers across its services.
‘Google is generating a ton of cash,’ says financial analyst Rob Enderle. ‘Facebook is wealthy on paper but not so much in raw cash. In a battle between the two today, Facebook is outmatched. But the trend is towards Facebook and away from Google. If that doesn’t change, we could see their positions reversed in five years.’
But whichever company triumphs, the real losers could be us.
‘Both companies make their money by selling information on their customers,’ says Enderle. ‘That puts their business models in direct conflict with our privacy.’
And if history is anything to go by, Page, Brin and Zuckerberg may well choose dollar signs over doing the right thing.
