After Google co-founder Larry Page announced Alphabet nearly two years ago, the full brunt of the transition appears to now be complete. The real reason for Alphabet being created was to keep things like Verily, Nest and Waymo separate from Google, legally. But up until now, they were all still technically subsidiaries of Google. Alphabet has now formed a new holdings company, XXVI Holdings Inc which now owns a portion of each of Alphabet’s companies. It allows these other companies that are under the Alphabet umbrella to be on the same legal footing as Google, which is obviously Alphabet’s largest company.
Another interesting change today is that Google is turning itself into a limited liability company, from a corporation. A Google spokesperson said that this won’t change how Google pays taxes, and that the change is partly related to the transformation from a listed public company into a business owned by a holding company. Typically, corporations are made to raise money from public investors who then expect disclosures on financial performance. Google first went public in 2004, and it has had a pretty good run on the stock exchange. Now that Alphabet is basically the only owner of Google, it makes more sense to change over to an LLC. It’s also important to note here that Waymo is an LLC as well.
Google’s co-founders always have a purpose behind their names these days. Alphabet was created because there was essentially a business at Google that fit every letter of the Alphabet. And now XXVI Holdings Inc is the number of letters in the alphabet expressed in Roman numerals. Definitely a rather interesting way to name these companies, but it does make sense, and it is exactly what you would expect from Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the co-founders of Google, Alphabet and now XXVI Holdings Inc. For those that use Google’s products, this won’t change a single thing. This is mostly on the financial side and for investors. But what this does for Alphabet is it is now able to do more without worrying about anti-competitive laws, seeing as Google is completely separate from its other companies now.