Alphabet owns Google and became one of the world’s highest-valued firms after its 2015 restructuring.
Alphabet Inc. was created in October 2015 as a holding company for Google and several other businesses. Google became a subsidiary, while founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin moved to leadership roles overseeing the broader corporate structure. Sundar Pichai became Google’s chief executive and later Alphabet’s CEO.
The restructuring separated Google’s core internet products from longer-term projects such as life sciences, autonomous vehicles, and other ventures. Google continued to contain the search engine, YouTube, Android, advertising operations, and cloud services.
Alphabet is often confused with Google because Google remains its best-known subsidiary and operating business. However, Alphabet is the publicly traded parent company whose shares are used to calculate the group’s market capitalization.