There was this moment in the fall of last year when executives from three big tech companies were called to testify in front of the Senate.

I'd call this here into order and I'd like to welcome our witnesses today.

They were supposed to talk about the run-up to the 2016 election and whether foreigners, mostly Russians, had manipulated their platforms.

Cheryl and Jack, I'm glad you decided to appear.

Jack Dorsey from Twitter showed up. So did Cheryl Sandberg from Facebook. But Larry Page,

who was supposed to be representing Google, wasn't there. No one from the company came.

I'm disappointed Google decided against sending the right senior level executive to participate.

Senators were kind of performative about it, but they were annoyed.

From Google Search, which continues to have problems surfacing absurd conspiracies,

to YouTube, where Russian-backed disinformation agents promoted hundreds of divisive videos,

to Gmail, where state-sponsored operatives attempted countless hacking attempts.

Google has an immense responsibility in this space.

Not long after that, Mark Bergen, who covers Google for Bloomberg News and Businessweek,

wrote a story headlined, Where in the World is Larry Page, implying that the company's

co-founder had kind of checked out.

With that story, we found difficulty finding people who actually talk to him on a regular

basis.

Huh.

At the same time, you know, he was funding and working on these self-flying car projects,

doing a lot more around sort of the really crazy moonshots at the company. But from what we've

gathered, he just didn't want to work anymore or didn't want to work as hard.

Which, I guess, if you're a billionaire, you can make that decision.

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