Google Founders May Net $8 Billion on Paper

That’s what the Google founders are expecting to earn on paper with the upcoming initial public offering of the company’s stock.

By keeping 30 percent of the shares in the company, founders Larry Page, 31, and Sergey Brin, 30, could be worth an estimated $4 billion or more each based on estimates of the value of the IPO.

Not bad for a pair of Stanford grad students who both grew up in middle-class homes as sons of college professors. And Brin, in fact, is relatively new to the country because his family moved to the United States from the Soviet Union in 1979.

Despite their remarkable success in technology, they've both turned a blind eye on the corporate American lifestyle.

At the Googleplex, the search engine’s name for its headquarters campus in Mountain View, Calif., Brin is often spotted flying on a Segway scooter, while Page prefers roller-blades and bicycles. And both get around in a Toyota Prius, the hybrid gas-and-electric car.

Brin typically wears jeans and a T-shirt to work, while Page usually wears collared shirts and khakis.

Even without the IPO, they are both billionaires – and not married.

But both have girlfriends. Page has been dating an employee at Google, while Brin has started going out with the sister of a Google employee.

Much of the the aforementioned personal information on the pair was found through Google’s social networking site – Orkut.com – which is similar to Friendster.com and the like.

On Orkut, Brin has 117 friends while Page has 111.

The pair each hold nearly 38 million shares, or about 15 percent, of the company. By the time of the initial offering, those shares could total more than $25 billion.

Each of the men are determined with the company’s newfound wealth to “Make the World a Better Place,” according to the IPO filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday.

In the filing, Google informed potential investors that, "We intend to contribute significant resources to the foundation, including employee time and approximately 1 percent of Google's equity and profits in some form.

"We hope someday this institution may eclipse Google itself in terms of overall world impact by ambitiously applying innovation and significant resources to the largest of the world's problems," Page and Brin wrote.