Alphabet Inc.
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Alphabet Inc. is an American multinational technology conglomerate holding company headquartered in Mountain View, California. Alphabet is the world's third-largest technology company by revenue, after Amazon and Apple, the largest technology company by profit, and one of the world's most valuable companies. It was created through a restructuring of Google on October 2, 2015, and became the parent holding company of Google and several former Google subsidiaries. Alphabet is listed on the large-cap section of the Nasdaq under the ticker symbols GOOGL and GOOG; both classes of stock are components of major stock market indices such as the S&P 500 and Nasdaq-100. Alphabet has been described as a Big Tech company. The establishment of Alphabet Inc. was prompted by a desire to make the core Google business "cleaner and more accountable" while allowing greater autonomy to group companies that operate in businesses other than Internet services. Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin announced their resignation from their executive posts in December 2019, with the CEO role to be filled by Sundar Pichai, who is also the CEO of Google. Page and Brin remain employees, board members, and controlling shareholders of Alphabet Inc. Alphabet Inc. has faced numerous legal and ethical controversies, including a 2017 lawsuit against Uber over stolen self-driving technology, a 2020 privacy settlement over Google+ data exposure, and multiple antitrust actions from the United States, France, and Japan. It has also been accused of labor law violations related to worker organizing and was forced to file for bankruptcy in Russia after its bank account was seized in 2022. In 2023, the company was widely criticized for mass layoffs that impacted 12,000 employees, many of whom discovered their termination only upon losing account access.