A Coveted Landing Strip for Google's Founders 427
An anonymous reader writes "The NYT reports, "In the annals of perks enjoyed by America's corporate executives, the founders of Google may have set a new standard: an uncrowded, federally managed runway for their private jet that is only a few minutes' drive from their offices. For $1.3 million a year, Larry Page and Sergey Brin get to park their customized wide-body Boeing 767-200, as well as two other jets used by top Google executives, on Moffett Field, an airport run by NASA that is generally closed to private aircraft."
That's not evil... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:That's not evil... (Score:4, Funny)
So what's next? (Score:5, Funny)
Sorry Google-one, all our fighters are currently in Iraq.
Air Force, would 13.4 million dollars help?
Your fighters are on the way, Google-one.
Re:So what's next? (Score:5, Funny)
Gonna cost ya, Google One...
Re:That's not evil... except if you are a sharehol (Score:3, Insightful)
Last I heard, Larry and Sergey bought the plane with their own personal money and the AP story, http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5gbqVOej9Cr2S_GYOFg6m6_PUn4jw [google.com] makes it sound like they are paying for parking out of their own personal money as well. Therefore there's no direct impact to Google shareholders -- Google is not paying for the parking or the jet. If Larry and Sergey want to buy nice toys (and a place to put their toys) with their fortune then that's all up to t
Larry's had that for a while (Score:4, Funny)
The only consolation is that I get to rack up miles while they don't. Are first class accomodations and free blowjobs from hand-selected stewardii worth the loss of airline mileage?
Sadly, I don't think I'll ever know.
Re:Larry's had that for a while (Score:5, Insightful)
Why have we as a society become so filled with entitlement and laziness? If you have the money, you can get it. If you don't have the money, work for it. These guys were nobody's once upon a time as well... it's not like the American dream is dead, it's the American dreamer that's dead.
Re:Larry's had that for a while (Score:5, Interesting)
I know plenty of people who worked harder but got no where mostly due to things out of their control.
Re:Larry's had that for a while (Score:4, Informative)
I think if there is one thing that is just plain hard work, it's getting into MIT.
Re:Larry's had that for a while (Score:5, Interesting)
There are a lot of people who work hard - and the majority of 1st gen. billionaires are no exception. But reading Bill Gates history, I believe there was a definite element of luck there - right place at the right time - along with some cunning to get where they are at.
With the same skill set and drive, just with different luck, I could definitely see Gates as head of just another software company and be worth "only" $50-100 million.
I don't think he's the exception among the billionaires. I could see a lucky break at the difference between moderately sucessful multi-millionaire businessmen no one heard of and the ultra-rich - in fact it seem to be that the once in the lifetime jackpot is what propels them to ridiculous wealth.
The one exception to this I think would be Steve Jobs - that guy could probably make fortunes several times over starting from scratch.
Re:Larry's had that for a while (Score:4, Insightful)
Gates surrounded himself with guys like Allen who were excellent coders and geeks, but Gates was always the one with the vision. He was an expert coder and involved himself with everything from writing legal documents to writing bootstraps and Altair emulators, and later on to giving taxing interviews to all the big project leaders to ensure they knew what they were doing as well as he knew what they were doing.
Gates saw the first computer come out and decided to get out of school and into the PC industry, the very moment it was created.
If Jobs hadn't run into Woz you can be sure we would never have heard of Jobs. Gates depended far less on chance bumping into others; he was far more determined and aggressive (for better or for worse) in carving out Microsoft's niche, and he played much more than the marketing&managerial role that Jobs has played.
If you're not familiar with the story of Gates' success I recommend "Hard Drive", which documents it (it's independent of Microsoft and Gates).
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Google making money out of the idea was a result in being able to talk to the right people at the right time. They didn't have any magic technology at hand but they were
Re:Larry's had that for a while (Score:5, Insightful)
All the very rich people I know worked about as hard as most of my successful friends.
A ditch digger works hard. It's not just about working "hard", it's about working on the right things.
They didn't have any magic technology at hand but they were unique compared to their competition in that they had enough resources to demo their early work.
Almost everything looks obvious after the fact. The wheel is "obvious", yet very few cultures actually invented it.
The fact that Google is *still* the best search engine ought to tell you something about the difficulty.
Most what is now considered their innovation was all discussed on usenet news groups long before their research was done.
Talk is cheap, and ideas are cheaper. The devil is in the details.
I know lots of others others who worked hard and had it all destroyed by bad luck.
There's no such thing as bad luck. *Everybody* encounters bad luck. There is only lack of preparation for disaster and lack for foresight for consequences.
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I think Google's done a great job, but this is entirely the wrong impression. Search engines were not only obvious, they were old hat, the battles already fought and decided, when Google appeared on the scene. And Google has never, by any standard measure, been the best search engine, exc
Re:Larry's had that for a while (Score:4, Insightful)
Search engines were not only obvious, they were old hat, the battles already fought and decided, when Google appeared on the scene.
Indeed... which makes their success and utter domination all the more remarkable.
Google's "breakthrough" was being fast through distributed search, which is something that all the search engines were working on for some time.
What? I used a lot of search engines prior to Google, in fact, I still have them bookmarked: AltaVista, Excite, HotBot, MSN, Northern Light, Yahoo, etc. I used to search a variety of them because each one seemed to do better at various results. After Google appeared, I gradually stopped using them all, because Google consistently gave better results.
I don't recall Google being any faster than any of them. They all gave pretty much instantaneous results.
But the difference between "quite successful" and "super-rich" is luck, not hard work.
I might agree that the difference between "rich" and "super-rich" is mostly luck. And certainly some people get rich by attaching themselves to the right people (e.g., become one of the first 10 employees of an eventually huge IPO). But by and large, to be rich, you have to want to be rich and dedicate your thinking to that goal, and take the appropriate risks, and try again when you fail.
The google founders weren't smarter or harder-working than a hundred other people.
The issue isn't necessarily raw intelligence or level of hard work. Take 100 smart people and put them in the same situation as the Google guys. Would they fall into the same riches? I'd say "no". Technology isn't everything! You have to be able to work with people, give up control where necessary, take control when necessary, on and on. For example, Theo de Raadt is a smart, hard-working guy. Assuming he was motivated to do it, could he have created Google? Not just the search engine, the whole enchilada. Not a chance in hell, because he's an abrasive psycho.
Creating a successful company takes a lot of broad skills. There's a reason that 90% of start-ups fail.
Re:Larry's had that for a while (Score:4, Insightful)
Original poster didn't deny this, but simply pointed out that, for every rich person that "worked like crazy for years before they made it," there's 99 people who worked just as hard for just as long (if not moreso) that didn't.
It's not that they don't work hard, but that working hard isn't the deciding factor.
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The only thing that makes me not want to be them is not that they are filthy rich and having fun with it, it is some of their business decisions. Specificly, the particular two tiered scheme of stock and the sheer ego when dealing with the SEC. The stock scheme leaves the Google founders with almost all of the voting rights, because their premium stock gives preferencial voting rights. This means that the shareholders have no control over a company they own, without the founders needing to worry about commo
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Re:Larry's had that for a while (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobody works their way to becoming multi-billionaires... There's absolutely nothing one man could do that could possibly be worth that kind of compensation.
They, like many others, hit the stock-market lottery. There's enough stupid people that will buy stocks for millions of times what they're actually worth, that early buyers can become billionaires just because they happen to be there.
No amount of (legal) work can guarantee you that level of riches. You can only hope to be in the right place, at the right time. You'd do just as well to buy a $1 "Power-Ball" lottery ticket as to invest many thousands of dollars (of cash, or your time/service) in some start-up, hopping it'll be the next ridiculously overhyped and unbelievably overpriced stock-market darling.
That's crap. There are more American entrepreneurs making themselves rich right now than there ever have been before. Few or none are naive enough to believe they can work enough to make themselves billionaires on merit.
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Re:Larry's had that for a while (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobody works their way to becoming multi-billionaires... There's absolutely nothing one man could do that could possibly be worth that kind of compensation.
They, like many others, hit the stock-market lottery. There's enough stupid people that will buy stocks for millions of times what they're actually worth, that early buyers can become billionaires just because they happen to be there.
The jetstream is always moving fast, but you can't catch the jetstream if you don't fill the balloon and cut the tethers.
Brin and Page did "hit the stock-market lottery." I agree with that. But they would not have been able to get there without actually doing some interesting stuff and telling people about it. Yes, there are a lot of people who are doing interesting stuff and telling people about it, yet don't hit the stock-market lottery. But the fact that all this interesting stuff gets done is what advances society.
I think that's what the other posters were referring by the "American Dreamer is dead" sentiment. A dream without action is a fantasy of entitlement and resentment. A dream with action is a goal.
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I also find myself occasionally thinking "
Ridiculous. (Score:4, Insightful)
"Oh boy! Look at us! We have a private runway we can land on because we are *so* important and special!"
It is far more impressive to see people who don't take themselves so seriously. Obviously, this s a rare trait, given the human condition of thinking oneself is at the center of the universe.
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Why have we as a society become so filled with entitlement and laziness? If you have the money, you can get it. If you don't have the money, work for it. These guys were nobody's once upon a time as well... it's not like the American dream is dead, it's the American dreamer that's dead.
If I had
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Lots of people dream that dream, but know it's just that, a dream. The chances of attaining that are insane. And living your life out striving to attain that...well, lets just say you're in for a lot of disappointment.
Besides, for a lot of people anymore, that's not the dream they want to attain. There are other worthy dreams that don't center around becoming one of the richest people on the block.
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But I think what people are reacting to is the excess seen in executive compensation. When the execs are getting obscene bonuses even after being only marginally effect or worse (Home Depot comes to mind), people have a right
Re:Larry's had that for a while (Score:4, Insightful)
So in short, we stopped following the dream when we realized it's just a dream, and the waking world is run by different rules.
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Purely anecdotal evidence but... I know _three_ millionaires who did the equivalent of working up from being a dishwasher - and no lottery winners. My best friend from high school run an advertising/media company he built from sc
Re:Larry's had that for a while (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Larry's had that for a while (Score:5, Insightful)
I doubt it, at least for now, considering the scrutiny applied to corporate books these days. If you assume they aren't then they wouldn't be doing their jobs if they didn't take advantage of every possible avenue to minimize Google's taxes. So whether they have 10 tax accountants or 10,000 they are likely paying all the tax they are legally required to pay in the face of 'breaks' specifically designed to enourage business.
It is also notable that corporate taxes are little more than proxy taxes on individuals. They are part of the cost of doing business, like the price of landing strips, and are passed on to customers through the price of goods and services.
Re:Larry's had that for a while (Score:5, Insightful)
Google is a an economic driver, not a load.
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That's part of why I've come to the conclusion that a land tax would be the best tax of all. Basically, you can't avoid it because a) you can't hide land, and b) any "accountant trickery" would be publicly
Re:Larry's had that for a while (Score:5, Interesting)
You know I hear people complaining about this crap in Fortune 500 corporations and it sounds fine and dandy. It isn't until you look at the little guy that you realize why there are so many republicans fighting for these tax breaks.
I am a small business owner. I am incorporated because if anything were to ever go wrong it would basically end me financially ever after if I were not. Every dime I make gets taxed twice. The corporation is taxed, and then I am taxed. You bet I do everything legally possible to avoid taxation because I am paying double taxes! Forget private jets, those tax breaks impact my grocery budget.
This problem doesn't change in a bigger company, just the number of people involved in the scale. All of the profits are paid to employees or shareholders. The employees are taxed and the shareholders are taxed, in many cases the shareholders also invested after-tax money.
The solution is simple, abolish corporate taxes altogether since their profits are either reinvested or paid out to others who have to report them as income. Furthermore the payouts to shareholders should be taxed as income because for your average corporation the one or three shareholders are the owners.
I also think all car expenses, utilities, rent, phone, internet, and food should be deductions on personal income tax.
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private airstrip (Score:3, Funny)
You can't open it up to commercial flights. Everyone who's seen a bond film knows the bad guys need their own private airstrip.
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NASA doesn't have all that many planes [nasa.gov]
Alabama:1
California: 17
Florida:5
Ohio: 6
Texas: 41
Virginia: 8
Many of those are small fighter jets, so if NASA needs a way to transport dozens of scientists at a time to high altitude, its options are somewhat limited. The Gulfstream V can transport 14-19 people to 51,000 feet, the Boeing 767 presumably can carry a few more, albeit to a lower altitude. I wonder if either aircraft is configured to allow for a substantial scientific payload, though.
Re:Larry's had that for a while (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, the taxpayer has been paying to maintain a perfectly usable, but practically unused airstrip because of your typical Bay Area NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard).
The peninsula has many resources that can't be used because certain people, and forgive my generalization, who are often paying negligible property taxes thanks to California's brilliant (NOT) Prop 13, want to keep things the way they were 50 fucking years ago. That's great when other people are paying for the facilities and infrastructure that those assholes enjoy on a daily basis.
At the same time tons of people with an otherwise considered extremely well paying job (that bring in the actual tax $$$) will only be able to rent or perhaps if they have dual income they can get a $800K condo with $400/mo HOA fees. Interestingly enough I never hear those people complain about stuff like this.
I'd like to see how people that pay tax as if their property was worth $200K would like to live in a place in California that _actually_ is worth $200K. See how much they would object to some rich dudes parking a plane somewhere if that also meant that finally electricity would come to town.
If this is the beginning of the erosion of the out of balance power of the NIMBYs, then that is excellent news. Unless of course you'd prefer the bay area to become a Route 66 (See also: Cars).
Anyways, I'm glad to see that Anna Eshoo had a healthy response to this.
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Aside from my sarcasm above, a company like Google has only a few executives "up there". Don't you think their time is better spent on meetings rather than being forced to travel for hours to the airport? Y
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YES!
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not evil? how about global warming? (Score:3, Insightful)
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That's just being silly. There are reasons. You may not think they're good enough, but it doesn't stop them being reasons. For example, flights from Belfast to London could be considered short haul as they're round about an hour, but there is nothing else that can get you there in a comparable period of time because of the Irish Sea. Short haul flig
Re:not evil? how about global warming? (Score:4, Insightful)
Wait -- that's under the assumption that you're actually interested in protecting the earth, and not merely coming up with the most plausible pretense for banning behaviors you don't like.
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I think the above claim *really* means to say that the exhaust contains one ton of CO2 per person. But its exhaust doesn't merely come from what's on the airplane. In its combustion process, it takes O2 from the atmosphere, and combines it with the C in the fuel. (C + O2 -> CO2) So that figure includes not just stuff in the fuel tank, but also O2 that was taken from the atmosphere and then returned in the form of CO2. The fact that the fuel tank
Re:not evil? how about global warming? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Ok, continue the comparison - 1500 gallons of fuel to carry 290 people around 570 miles at a 767's average cruising speed gives us about 165,300 person-miles.
Let's assume I leave the rearmost seats alone and have a five-person configuration plus some luggage - that's still 250,000 person-miles albeit at around 1/6 the average speed.
Whichever way you slice it, it's more juice than I'm going to burn in two years.
Question (Score:3, Funny)
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all they need now ... (Score:2)
Link and Driving Directions (Score:2)
Start address: 1600 Amphitheatre Pkwy Mountain View, CA 94043, USA
End address: 37.414243, -122.048793
Start at: 1600 Amphitheatre Pkwy Mountain View, CA 94043, USA
1. Head west on Amphitheatre Pkwy toward Garcia Ave - 0.6 mi
2. Turn left to merge onto US-101 S toward San Jose - 1.8 mi
3. Take exit 398A for Moffett Blvd toward NASA Pkwy - 0.1 mi
4. Turn right at Moffett Blvd - 0.3 mi
5. Turn left at Moffett Blvd/Rte Jones Rd - 0.3 mi
6. Turn right at King Rd - 0.4 mi
7. King Rd turns right and beco
Nice one, NASA! (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyhow, good on NASA for earning another $1.3mil per year using something that they already had. I'm sure they have all kinds of stuff in the contract that prohibits Google execs from using the strip when NASA projects are actively going on, which probably happens pretty seldom. I'm sure someone will say 'drop in the bucket', but that's $1.3mil that didn't come from taxes... And that's a lot of taxes.
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Alright, but we're also missing a "I'm morally superior to you" post. And here it is:
I also make lots of money. Not as much as those guys, but still enough to make a decent living. I don't own a car and never will. Taking the bus or train when you want to go somewhere is simple, and costs less. Cars pollute and driving them, is according to most research, the primary cause of global warning. So if
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New Jet Eases Travel Hassles For Bill Gates
By LAURENCE ZUCKERMAN
Microsoft Corp's chairman, William H Gates, buys $21 million private jet with his own money; Gates has long been known for flying coach and barring his employees from flying first class
October 27, 1997 Technology News
A study has shown we produce as much carbon dioxide walking the same distance as driving a car. I hope th
No Ad link (Score:5, Informative)
BTW, even Bush could find this link in the article easily, so please don't mod.
Just a 767? (Score:2, Informative)
This guy's got the right idea - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6768237.stm [bbc.co.uk]
Ok, ok, so it's not like you can take the kids to the park with it, but why goto a park when you can just have your own built on-board?
Party airplane (Score:3, Interesting)
I worked at the base a few years ago and the runway wasn't being used most of the time, except by the 129th rescue wing of the Air National Guard and the occasional astronaut trainer jet. The base doesn't really have any residential neighbors but that noise would carry a long distance I assume.
If you work there and fly a private plane you can already fly to work (at least that's what I heard when I was there). But of course large commercial size jets is a different story entirely.
It's collecting information (Score:5, Funny)
*incredibly loud jet sound*
*knock on door*
"Hi, I'm Larry, and this is Sergei, we heard that you were having a party. We brought, well, er, the contents of the local Walmart's liquor counter."
"Well, that's very nice... say, how did you find out about the party?"
*shifty look*
"You sent out invites through gmail..."
Not really a special deal. (Score:5, Informative)
Moffett has fairly extensive facilities that are not nearly as heavily utilized as they were during the cold war and WW2, and it is in the heart of Silicon Valley.
Moffett is no longer a military base, but a federal facility that is used for many purposes - mostly but not exclusively centered around technology.
For perhaps a decade, NASA has been leasing out commercial space to private enterprises at Moffett for not only NASA-related research operations, but for general, business operations of private institutions. In additional, there are private educational institutions at Moffett.
Re:misuse of a public resource (Score:5, Insightful)
Some people are a waste of oxygen.
not really the first (Score:5, Insightful)
The actor, according to a local newspaper, "can walk out his door, under a canopied walkway and into the cockpit [of his Boeing], open the long mechanized gate [giving on to the runway] and be airborne in minutes."
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Oh come now. Surely it has to take at least an hour or two to charge up the Thetan deflector shields. A clear can't be too careful these days.
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Yes. But then John Travolta adds so
much to our economy, both cultural and monetary...
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So turn that around and... Where's the difference?
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Travolta, like many top level actors, IS a company - JTP Films.
This ... (Score:2)
Where's the problem? (Score:2, Insightful)
They get to park the Gulfstreams AND the wide-body Boeing 767-200 right next door for an extra million or so. NASA makes a nice pile and gets to run some experiments. Sounds like a win-win to me.
Coveted? (Score:2)
Remind me again, the point of this coveting?
How nice,,,, (Score:5, Funny)
Used to live near there (Score:2)
It's a big hangar where they used to (I think) work on Space Shuttle parts back in the 80s. All I can say is this: they never let Larry Ellison land his plane there. That says a whole lot. (The big story back in the early 2000s was Larry violating noise ordinances at San Jose airport.)
Re:Used to live near there (Score:4, Funny)
Government Runway? (Score:2)
Re:Government Runway? (Score:4, Insightful)
Do they get to use the blimp hangar? (Score:2)
I don't want know. (Score:3, Funny)
I worked at NASA Ames - I think it's a good idea. (Score:3, Informative)
I worked at NASA Ames (which has basically taken over the whole Moffett campus, since they're all together.) We did tours of the different areas there, and I think the most fun was touring "Hangar 1" and talking to the guys in the tower for the airstrip. They basically sat around all day drinking coffee, waiting for the one or two planes per day they had taking off or landing. The only excitement they ever got was the occasional presidential flight- when chelsea was going to Stanford, clinton would fly in to Moffett.
I think it's a great idea, and they should do more of it- lots of land developers are salivating at the huge chunk of real estate that moffett has there. On top of that, they're trying to demolish Hangar 1 [savehangarone.org], since it's full of toxic substances, the upkeep on it is really expensive, and it's not doing anything (well, except being a stage for a recent Lexus commercial.)
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Re:Money! Money! Money! (Score:5, Informative)
As an example from history, when Queen Elizabeth the 1st of England went on her travels it was expected that the local gentry would provide accomadation for free. This was a double edged sword for the provider - staying in the queen's good books was important but putting her up could cost as much as six month's worth of the typical income for the provider. So the queen, the richest person in the land, was getting freebee board and lodge, and at the highest posible level.
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Actually, historically speaking, English monarchs typically weren't all that rich, or at least didn't have much in the way of what we would call disposable income. Everything they needed to pay for came out of the royal treasury - that included paying for things like ships and armies, as well as their own personal expenses.
The state of Pennsylvania exists because Charles II needed to pay back a large debt owed to William Penn's father (Admiral Penn) - the only way he could pay for it was by forking over
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It's 'perq', short for perquisite, not 'perk'.
perhaps they mean perk [reference.com]
They're carrying themselves, since its their aircraft, see the def. of jaunt [reference.com] for the rest
Yeah! You kick em out! (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course, this is exactly how visionary market creating companies turn into, well, HP. I suppose it's inevitable, they decided to float on the markets, you have to expect those results.
worth 4 tenths of a cent per share? (Score:5, Interesting)
Google has 312 million shares outstanding. $1.3 million dollars per year, spread over 312 million shares, is only 4 tenths of a cent per share. As a shareholder, if you are worried about that, you have taken your eye off the ball.
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Or better yet, the 767 itself cost around $130 million. 100x the cost of the parking spot.
T
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Actually, no. Most outstanding shares for GOOG are non-voting (or at least reduced voting). Page and Brin retain a majority of the votes, no matter how many shares he buys.
A better way is "fire" them from managing his money by simply selling his shares. I'm sure they will cry many tears.
RTFA (Score:2)
The jets are not owned by Google, but by a seperate corporation (H211 Inc.) owned by the google executives themselves.