Larry Page has never published an IQ score. Figures of 150 or 160 repeat across listicles and Q&A sites without a test, date or source, many links, zero authority.
Backlinks into a childhood
Read the way PageRank reads the web: every influence below points into the person he became.
Education, as a crawl log
Every institution he passed through, and what it recorded.
Rank a tiny web yourself
Five pages. Toggle who links to whom and watch the scores re-balance. Simplified PageRank, damping factor 0.85, an illustration of the idea, not Google's production ranking.
Page A leads with 2 inbound links: the most-linked page wins here.
Everything he built or bet on
The Stanford crawler that followed links backwards to find which pages cited which. Ran on university servers until it strained the campus network.
“Method for node ranking in a linked database” (US 6,285,999), filed by Stanford with Page as inventor and licensed exclusively to Google.
Incorporated with Brin in September 1998, working out of a rented Menlo Park garage.
Began as Page timing himself with a metronome while turning the pages of a book, to estimate what scanning every book would take.
Page backed buying the small Android startup, which became the world's most-used mobile operating system.
An Alphabet company researching the biology of ageing and age-related disease.
Personally funded electric flying-car and air-taxi projects; the company wound down in 2022.
Who held the wheel
Page ran the company twice, handed it off twice. Bar width is proportional to years.
First stint as CEO while Google was a startup. Investors pushed for an experienced chief executive.
Eric Schmidt became CEO; Page ran products as president, alongside Brin, through the 2004 IPO.
Back as CEO. He consolidated product lines and folded dozens of smaller services.
Restructured into Alphabet, a holding company, and became its CEO; Sundar Pichai took Google.
Stepped back from executive roles. Remains a board member and, with Brin, a controlling shareholder.
Sources
- Brin, S. & Page, L. (1998). The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine. WWW7
- US Patent 6,285,999, Method for node ranking in a linked database
- University of Michigan commencement address (2009)
- Alphabet Inc. founders' letter (December 2019)
- What's Your IQ editorial review of circulated figures