For as long as anyone can remember, Andy Rubin – nicknamed “Android” by his colleagues at Apple in the late Eighties – has been trying to make his fellow humans obsolete. The shaven-headed 56-year-old engineer, who dresses in black leather jackets and metal-framed glasses, might be best known for the mobile operating system he created – that would be Android, of course – but in Silicon Valley, it is his love of bringing machines to life that has set him apart.
Described memorably as a “big, arrogant fuck” by the late Steve Jobs and an “aberrant genius” by Google’s former chairman Eric Schmidt (the latter was an indirect remark), Rubin’s many elaborate creations are the stuff of geek legend.
In the early days of Android, Rubin fitted his Silicon Valley home with a retinal-scanning doorbell that, if it didn’t recognise a visitor, would activate a robot arm that would reach down and grab a mallet, then strike a gong. (He said it was useful for screening out ex-girlfriends.) Later, after Google bought his company and installed him in Building 44 of the Googleplex, he programmed another robot arm to make him a cup of coffee whenever he sent it a text message.
But Rubin’s pièce de résistance came after Google moved him from Android to lead a new robotics division in 2013. Thanks to the acquisition of a company named Boston Dynamics, Rubin ended up the proud owner of “Atlas” – a six-foot humanoid with an expressionless steel face. In a now infamous promotional video from 2016, Atlas is shown stacking boxes in a warehouse while an engineer armed with a hockey stick attempts to sabotage it at every turn. (The video has since spawned its own YouTube genre – “robot abuse” – with tens of thousands of fans.) Even when Atlas is knocked down, however, it simply clambers back to its feet again – Terminator-like – and carries on with its work.
Given all that, Rubin should today still be Google’s “Mr Robot”, leading the company’s diversification from online advertising into so-called “machine learning” and artificial intelligence, guaranteeing it a place as the world’s next trillion-dollar company after Apple, Microsoft and Amazon. (Google is now part of a broader holding company, Alphabet, formed in 2015 to facilitate this very purpose.)
But alas, events have taken a much darker – and more human – turn.
When Rubin resigned under mysterious circumstances after less than a year as Google’s robotics chief, he helped set in motion an extraordinary sequence of events that now represent an existential crisis for the internet search giant. It’s a state of affairs made all the more remarkable by the fact that Google, with its utopian campus in Mountain View, California and access to the thoughts and feelings of virtually every online human, was until recently seen as an untouchable, almost godlike entity, operating beyond any borders and several light years above the fray.
There has been a walkout of 20,000 employees, a potential multibillion-dollar lawsuit from shareholders, a nonstop procession of Me Too scandals and political attacks from all sides, including a €4.3 billion (£3.6bn) fine from the European Union and threatened antitrust action by 50 US attorneys general. One 2020 presidential candidate, the Democrat Elizabeth Warren, wants to break up the company entirely.
Meanwhile, Schmidt, who once declared that the company needed to hold on to boundary-pushing employees such as Rubin because they drive “product excellence”, left the board last summer after 18 years – and Google’s multibillionaire founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, have stepped down as CEO and president respectively of Alphabet, while facing calls for an end to their combined 51 per cent control as shareholders.
Back in 2013, some feared that if technology advanced too rapidly, Rubin could end up a real-life version of Dr Ford from HBO’s Westworld, creating robots that attain free will and decide to escape their human overlords. Rubin jokingly named his division “Replicant” – after the killer androids in Blade Runner – for that very reason.
But the mess he has left in his wake is more the stuff of the National Enquirer than a Philip K Dick novel. There’s an alleged “sex ring” in which women were paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to be “owned” and loaned out for sex, often as part of threesomes while others watched; an extramarital affair that involved alleged coerced oral sex in a hotel room; under-the-table payments from Google of $2 million (£1.2m) per month; and a female madam known only by a single initial, “M”, who allegedly both ran the sex ring and participated in the orgies. All of which has been outlined in a divorce lawsuit so salacious that portions of it have been redacted as it plays out in the courts of San Mateo County, California.
Neither Google nor Rubin’s lawyer responded to inquiries from GQ, while a lawyer representing Rubin’s wife, who filed the legal complaint, said he couldn’t comment. However, Rubin has tweeted, “I never coerced a woman to have sex in a hotel room,” and, “These false allegations are part of a smear campaign by my ex-wife.”
There are some, of course, such as Tesla’s Elon Musk or world wide web architect Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who place more emphasis on the threat of Google’s AI-enhanced machines rising up and destroying the world. But thanks to Android Andy and his former colleagues, there now seems a much greater chance that the fall of Google’s humans could destroy the company first.
The story of how Andy Rubin came to be Google’s chief robot master begins on a white sand beach in the Cayman Islands in 1989.
Then just 26, Rubin was a computer science graduate from the distinctly second-tier Utica College in upstate New York and he was working in Switzerland as a robot technician for the renowned camera lens manufacturer Carl Zeiss.
Having flown to the British West Indies for a break, he was taking a walk by the ocean one morning when he came across an unkempt young man asleep on a fold-up chair. The man’s name was Bill Caswell. He was an Apple engineer, also there on holiday, but his girlfriend had thrown him out of their beach cottage after a fight.
Rubin gave him a place to stay, the two became fast friends and, before long, Rubin had left his job in Switzerland to work for Apple in Cupertino – this being the era after Steve Jobs was forced out by his fellow board member John Sculley, the marketeer behind the Pepsi Challenge.
Rubin’s geek credentials were already pretty much impeccable.
Raised in Chappaqua, New York – today the home of Bill and Hillary Clinton – Rubin’s psychologist father had run a direct-marketing business that put special offers for high-tech gadgets inside consumers’ credit card bills. The gadgets first had to be photographed and, after that, they ended up in young Rubin’s bedroom, where he took them apart.
By high school, he was adept enough to jury-rig an R2-D2 toy so it could be remote controlled by his computer, allowing him to send it on a mission to torment his brother.
At Apple, Rubin continued to revel in such high jinks, once pranking the entire engineering team by reprogramming the phone system to make it look as though incoming calls were coming from Sculley’s office. Whoever picked up was offered a lavish stock grant.
But it was Rubin’s next job, at the Apple spin-off General Magic – which he joined in 1992, just before he turned 30 – that secured him a place in Silicon Valley history.
Known as the most important technology company no one has ever heard of, General Magic was home to what one Wired magazine writer described as a team of “code wizards, hardware ninjas and telecoms adepts” who worked all hours in a laboratory known as The Houdini Room, sleeping in bunk beds and often forgetting to shower, while rabbits and parrots roamed freely to aid creativity.
The company’s goal was to develop a “small, intimate life-support system that people carry with them everywhere” – in other words, a smartphone, which they named the Pocket Crystal – the only problem being that the wireless and touchscreen technology necessary to turn such a concept into a real product didn’t exist and wouldn’t for another 15 years.
After a frenzied stock market offering, General Magic and its stillborn operating system, Magic Cap, disappeared without a trace. (Being too early, as they say in Silicon Valley, is the same as being wrong.) As for the Pocket Crystal, it ended up on the market as the clunky, hardback-sized Sony Magic Link Personal Intelligent Communicator, priced at a whopping £1,300, adjusted for inflation.
It sold all of 3,000 units, mostly to friends and family.
Rubin, meanwhile, washed up at WebTV, where he lived up to his Android nickname by building a wheeled, internet-linked robot with a webcam and mic mounted to an articulating arm. The idea was to spy on his colleagues, which worked brilliantly... until the robot was hacked and turned against its master. A brief industrial espionage scare followed, resulting in a now-legendary bollocking for Rubin and the permanent retirement of his creation.
Rubin left WebTV at the turn of the millennium to open a robot shop in Palo Alto – The Laboratory was its name – and made another attempt to develop a smartphone. This time, the device was named the Danger Hiptop and featured a BlackBerry-like keyboard and sliding screen, allowing full internet browsing along with the usual calling, texting, calendar and email functions.
Although there were similar early smartphones on the market, the Danger Hiptop – later rebranded the Sidekick – became a nerd-chic status symbol, thanks in part to Rubin’s love of science fiction, which he played up by borrowing the name Danger from a catchphrase of the transistor-headed robot in Sixties TV show Lost In Space.
The Hiptop, of course, would never be more than a cult product – but it did win over two ambitious young engineers who attended a lecture that Rubin gave about the device at Stanford University. Their names: Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
Most of all, they were impressed that Rubin had set the Hiptop’s home page to their then-fledgling search engine, Google.
The reported $50m (£29m) that Google paid in 2005 for Rubin’s next venture, Android Inc – gazumping telecoms billionaire Craig McCaw – is considered one of the greatest deals of all time.
According to recent analysis, Google has since made more than $30bn (£23bn) from selling advertising on the mobile operating system, which has a crushing 86 per cent market share, far ahead of Apple’s iOS. (The iPhone, incidentally, was coinvented by another ex-General Magic engineer, Tony Fadell.) To put the acquisition price into perspective, just a year later, Google would pay $1.65bn (£868m) for YouTube.
For Rubin, however, the sale of Android was a matter of necessity.
When the Hiptop failed to break into the mainstream, he left Danger and returned to the Cayman Islands, where he began to explore the idea of building an open software platform for smartphones, as opposed to making the devices themselves. Rubin blew through all of his savings on the project – which he named Android because he’d owned the domain name for years. At one point, his old friend Steve Perlman from General Magic hand-delivered a loan of $10,000 in $100 bills to keep Rubin afloat.
Initially, it looked as though Android would be yet another flop.
Rubin and his team were reportedly laughed out of a meeting with Samsung in Seoul not long before the Google deal closed in 2005, while an unnamed figure at Nokia – then a huge player – smirked and said, “We don’t see this as a threat.” Engineers at Microsoft Windows Mobile were similarly dismissive.
An even bigger problem for Rubin, however, was Steve Jobs.
According to the book Dogfight: How Apple And Google Went To War And Started A Revolution by Fred Vogelstein, Rubin watched the 2007 webcast of Jobs’ iPhone launch in horror from the back of a Las Vegas taxi, eventually making the driver pull over so he could compose himself. Volgelstein quotes a then-Android executive, Ethan Beard, confessing, “We knew Apple was going to announce a phone. Everyone knew that. We just didn’t think it would be that good.”
The first device to run Android was set to be made by a Taiwanese company, HTC, with the press hyping it as “The G-Phone”. But when Rubin went back to the drawing board to make the device seem “less Nineties” – thus more iPhone-like – Jobs, according to Volgelstein, grew irate that his work was being ripped off and summoned Rubin, Page and other Googlers to Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino to explain themselves. These were the days when Google chairman, Eric Schmidt, had a seat on Apple’s board and relations between the two companies were relatively warm.
Vogelstein’s book reports that the G-Phone meeting quickly descended into a full-bore Jobsian screaming session. When Rubin suggested Jobs was being “anti-innovation” – akin to telling the Pope he’s anti-Catholic – Jobs proceeded to tear him to pieces, ridiculing him for trying to be his clone, down to his haircut and glasses.
In a separate tirade, Jobs called Schmidt while the Google chairman was on his way to the Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert. When they got cut off, Schmidt had to call Jobs back from a payphone and the verbal assault intensified, with Schmidt’s face reportedly turning “weird”.
Schmidt left the Apple board soon after, in 2009. And Jobs got his way.
Before its launch, the G-Phone was comprehensively neutered – with iPhone-like multitouch and unlocking features removed – out of fear of Apple lawsuits.
Rubin was said to be furious with Schmidt for caving. “Steve Jobs stole my lunch money,” he wrote on his office whiteboard after returning from his Cupertino mauling.
In a way, of course, it was Rubin who had the last laugh, with Android moving Google seamlessly from the desktop to the smartphone – and taking over the world along the way. The iPhone, however, was much more profitable. Indeed, even Jobs, who died in 2011, might have been surprised to learn that, just seven years later, it would make Apple the world’s first company worth more than $1 trillion (£773bn).
It was during their fight over the G-Phone that Jobs called Rubin a “big, arrogant f***”.
Rubin’s blunt, testosterone-soaked style – described euphemistically by one associate as “transparent and forthcoming” – was never an easy fit at Google, which liked to think of itself as a kind of ultra-enlightened corporate Shangri-La, summed up by its child-like branding and (now dropped) motto, “Don’t be evil”. Rubin even had to downgrade his car after being warned of causing offence at the Googleplex, where anything pricier than a BMW 3 Series is seen as crass.
Rubin’s messy personal life, however, was very much in keeping with the culture of the Mountain View company.
Google was (and is) notorious for its executive-subordinate relationships, with most of the executives being men and some of those men being worth hundreds of millions, or billions, of dollars. Larry Page briefly dated the future Yahoo! leader Marissa Mayer when she was Google’s employee No20 and Sergey Brin – on whom more later – was known for getting his “fingers caught in the cookie jar” with various attractive young female employees (this according to journalist Adam Fisher’s oral history, Valley Of Genius).
As for Eric Schmidt – the world’s least likely playboy, who has been married for 39 years – his many “friendships” with members of the opposite sex, including the former CNBC correspondent Kate Bohner (she was with him on that notorious Burning Man trip) were detailed by this magazine in 2014. Even the chief legal officer of Alphabet, David Drummond – whose annual salary and stock payments add up to tens of millions – had an affair with a subordinate, Jennifer Blakely, who became pregnant and later blogged about their relationship and custody arrangement, writing, “Hell does not begin to capture my life.”
It was little surprise, then, that Rubin struck up a romance with a Google marketing manager, Rie Hirabaru, not long after Android was acquired. Originally from Osaka, Japan, Hirabaru no doubt bonded with Rubin over his many visits to her home country, where he liked to shop for new robots. Both were previously married; neither had children.
In spite of Rubin’s “aberrant genius” reputation, the Android founder was also known to have a more playful side and it was to this, perhaps, that Hirabaru was most drawn. (One associate described her as “good-natured to a fault”.)
After a period of on-and-off dating, Hirabaru became pregnant in 2009. She was by now in her early thirties, earning $120,000 (£73,000) a year, while Rubin was in his mid-forties and worth at least $10m (£6m) – a sum that has since ballooned to an estimated $350m (£270m) thanks to stock options.
According to Hirabaru, this was when Rubin’s less playful streak emerged. Not only did he insist they get married before their child was born, she alleges, but he also demanded she sign a prenup – even setting her up with a lawyer. Meanwhile, in an all-too-familiar move for female Googlers involved with higher-up men, Hirabaru resigned to join another company, before leaving the industry entirely.
Rubin, meanwhile, was growing restless at Android and increasingly butting heads with future Google CEO Sundar Pichai.
Back in 1989, it had seemed obvious in Silicon Valley that the future was in digital networks and communication. The question was how to get there. By the start of the 2010s, it seemed equally obvious that the future was in robots, machine learning and the broader field of artificial intelligence, all of which could potentially allow Homo sapiens to leapfrog several millennia’s worth of evolution. But again, no one knew which path to take.
Page and Brin decided there was no better candidate to answer this question than Rubin. So they created a new robotics division for him to lead and by the end of 2013 his Blade Runner-inspired Replicant project was born.
The stakes were almost unimaginably high.
Rubin, essentially, was going to create another open-source platform – only this time he would have almost unlimited resources and his goal would be exponentially more ambitious, because he’d be creating the operating system upon which the so-called “internet of things” would run. These “things” being the autonomous, near-sentient vehicles, kitchen appliances, thermostats, delivery drones and service robots that most technologists agree are sure to become a part of our ten- to 15-year future.
Perhaps feeling guilty about how little they had paid Rubin for Android, Google allegedly proposed awarding him a $150m (£94m) stock grant on top of his reported $20m (£12.5m) annual salary and bonus. This in addition to a previous, one-off $40m (£25m) bonus in stock and $72m (£45m) stock grant, and a $14m (£9m) property loan – offered at a near-zero per cent interest rate – for Rubin to buy himself a beach estate in Japan.
When Rubin’s new job was revealed with a story and profile in the New York Times, he spoke of his work being a “moonshot” that would require a decade-long vision to provide “enough runway”. He added, “This is the world’s greatest job.”
Ten months later, he had resigned.
Historians may conclude that 2014 was the year Google’s “Don’t be evil” motto went from idealistic to flat-out risible.
The dysfunction began at the top, with Sergey Brin – the so-called “cute one” of the two Google founders, worth more than $50bn (£38bn) – suffering a health scare and midlife crisis. After his lavish 2007 wedding to the 23 And Me founder, Anne Wojcicki, on a sandbar in the Bahamas – she wore a white swimsuit, he a black one – Brin had signed up to his wife’s DNA service out of curiosity, only to find he carried a gene mutation linked to Parkinson’s disease. Thinking he might have only ten good years left, he radically changed his lifestyle, while Wojcicki made the controversial move of patenting a gene that may one day unlock a cure.
Amid the stress, Brin again got his fingers caught in the proverbial cookie jar, having an affair with a young British-Chinese marketing manager, Amanda Rosenberg – like the Duchess Of Cambridge and Princess Eugenie, she had attended Marlborough College in Wiltshire – who was at the time dating a Brazilian Android executive. Brin was then in his early forties; Rosenberg, who worked for Google Glass, was in her late twenties. Messages between the pair were discovered by Wojcicki, a marital blow-up ensued and the scandal was the talk of the global elite for several months. (The couple have since divorced, with Brin remarrying, to the entrepreneur Nicole Shanahan.)
Page was reportedly so furious with Brin for his poor judgement – the ethics of getting involved with an employee aside, he had a young family – that they stopped talking for a while.
Then things got even messier.
In spite of his marriage to Hirabaru in 2009, it turned out that Rubin, like Brin, had been having an affair with a subordinate – but worse, she had accused him of pressuring her into oral sex in a hotel room. The alleged incident had taken place in 2013, according to the New York Times, at a time when the woman said she had wanted to end the affair but feared reprisals. Rubin, who was reportedly once disciplined by Google after security staff found bondage sex videos on his work computer, emphatically denied any coercion.
It has since emerged that Rubin was given his $150m stock grant in spite of an internal investigation into the hotel room allegation being underway. However, the grant became meaningless after the accuser’s story was found to be credible and Rubin agreed to resign, leaving insufficient time for the stock to vest (become his).
Nevertheless, Google’s Leadership Development And Compensation Committee decided to award Rubin a $90m (£56m) exit package – conditional upon non-compete and non-disparagement agreements – to be paid in cash instalments of about $2m (£1.2m) per month over four years. The company also extended the terms of Rubin’s $14m (£9m) loan.
Publicly, Google gave no hint that anything was amiss. “I want to wish Andy all the best with what’s next,” said Page in a “hero’s farewell” statement. “With Android, he created something truly remarkably – with a billion-plus happy users.”
What’s more, Google made an investment in Rubin’s next company, Playground Global, a venture fund and design studio focused on robotics and artificial intelligence, which had an estimated $850m (£660m) under management before Rubin, again, moved on in 2019. Schmidt, meanwhile, lent his support to another Rubin venture, the Essential Phone, which pioneered the “notch” design, which maximises screen area by insetting the front-facing camera and ear speaker.
As for Rubin, he glossed over the reasons for his sudden exit, telling the technology columnist Walt Mossberg at a conference just before the Essential Phone’s launch that he had moved on because “I kind of got wanderlust a little bit”. The Essential Phone, incidentally, joined the Sony Magic Link and the Danger Hiptop in the annals of Rubin-backed hardware that never caught on. Although in an irony that Rubin must have appreciated, Apple’s subsequent generation of the iPhone – the “X” – shamelessly ripped off the notch.
For an uneasy couple of years, it seemed as though Rubin may have emerged unscathed.
It’s not known if Hirabaru knew the details behind her husband’s resignation, but they were on good enough terms to open a bakery together in Los Altos, California, which they wistfully named Voyageur Du Temps (“Time Traveller”). Located in a restored 1913 train station, it boasted a pair of Tokyo-trained chefs, a rare Bongard Cervap oven, a hand-coded register that dispensed change autonomously and a meeting room in the back that was protected by homemade magnetised locks.
Google, on the other hand, began to stumble badly after Rubin’s exit, becoming embroiled in PR crisis after PR crisis, while its robotics division was left in confusion and disarray.
One of the more damaging blow-ups was a leaked memo by a Google engineer named James Damore, in which he railed against the company’s diversity policies and argued that women were biologically less suited to jobs in technology than men.
Google, known for its almost Stasi-like control of internal communications, quickly tried to shut down the controversy by firing Damore. But that just prompted the right-wing media – egged on by President Trump, who implied Google executives had “helped” President Obama and Hillary Clinton – to turn him into a martyr. Soon enough, a class-action lawsuit (still pending) had been filed, claiming that Google discriminates against whites, Asians, males and those of a conservative disposition.
Things just kept going downhill from there.
There was a scandal over Google’s efforts to create a Chinese search engine compatible with Communist state censorship provisions; a scandal over Google’s artificial intelligence work for the Pentagon; a scandal over Google’s invasion of children’s privacy; and scandals over the company’s failure to curb hate speech and other harmful content.
Then, in late 2017, with Google fully under siege, technology website The Information revealed it was an investigation into an “inappropriate relationship” that led to Rubin’s departure, not “wanderlust” as he had suggested.
Rubin tried to keep a low profile, taking a leave of absence from his Essential Phone company, but the floodgates had opened.
A year later, Voyageur Du Temps suddenly closed, as the New York Times revealed the oral sex allegation against Rubin, the discovery of the bondage videos on his computer and his $90m (£56m) severance package. The paper later reported that another Google executive, Amit Singhal, had left with a $45m (£36.5m) payoff after being accused of groping an employee at a drunken off-campus event. His payoff was reduced to $15m (£12m) when he took a job at Uber, which he has since left. Singhal denied any wrongdoing.
This time, the most furious response came from Google’s own employees: 20,000 of them in 50 cities walked out of their jobs. One of the organisers of the protest, Claire Stapleton, told GQ, “What was so fundamentally infuriating about the heroes’ farewells for Rubin and others is that in recent years, Googlers, especially women, had lost faith in HR to handle misconduct complaints. The New York Times story highlighted how when women report indiscretions, perversely they get punished and the men get rewarded. Hence the ‘I reported. He got promoted’ signs that were so ubiquitous during the walkout.”
Stapleton, like other walkout organisers, has since left the company.
Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, did his best to contain the damage, writing in an open letter in 2016 – cosigned by the company’s newly hired “VP of people operations” Eileen Naughton – that the company was “taking an increasingly hard line on inappropriate conduct by people in positions of authority”, adding that 48 employees had been terminated without payoffs for sexual harassment, including 13 of senior management rank and higher, in the previous two years.
But new details of Rubin’s alleged behaviour kept coming, while getting progressively stranger and more debauched. These mostly came from Hirabaru, who had filed for a divorce from her husband in 2017, then sued him just before the New York Times’ exposé was published.
Her complaint accuses him of bullying her into what she describes as a “sham” prenup agreement, hiding his finances from her and squandering hundreds of thousands of dollars on “ownership relationships” with up to 20 women.
Rubin’s lawyers attempted to keep the lawsuit under seal, saying it was designed to embarrass the Android founder and prejudice his divorce case, but the (female) judge agreed to keep only portions of it off the public record. Left unredacted was a screenshot of a 2015 text message from Rubin to one unidentified woman, explaining, “Being owned is kinda like you are my property and I can loan you to other people, so you have to be OK with that.” The woman replies, “I’ll be OK with that.”
Hirabaru, who is seeking to nullify her prenup agreement – arguing that the lawyer whom Rubin arranged to represent her had an undisclosed conflict of interest with her husband – claims that Rubin’s alleged “ownership relationships” amounted to a “sex ring”, run with the help of another unidentified woman, known only as “M”. Her complaint alleges, “M was a willing participant, who would agree to perform various sexual acts with multiple men... [which] would be filmed for the enjoyment of Rubin and other men. After these orgies, Rubin would himself have sex with M off-camera. This flagrant and abusive conduct continued throughout [the] marriage.”
At the time the lawsuit was unsealed, Rubin’s lawyer described it as “a garden-variety family law dispute involving a wife who regrets her decision to execute a prenuptial agreement”, adding, “It is full of false claims.”
Whatever the truth of the claims, however, the case is anything but garden variety. That much is clear from the shareholder lawsuit filed in California’s Superior Court early last year against Google, which quotes extensively from Hirabaru’s complaint. The shareholder, James Martin, makes a case that Google’s management “wanted to make sure Rubin was paid handsomely to ensure his silence, since they apparently feared that if they fired Rubin for cause... all the tawdry details of sexual harassment by senior executives would become public”. Martin’s lawsuit, which describes Google’s management as “knowing and direct enablers of the sexual harassment and discrimination”, demands the payment of damages, plus interest, for breaches of fiduciary duty, abuse of control, gross mismanagement, waste of corporate assets and unjust enrichment, in addition to an overhaul of the company’s stock structure.
Even for a company worth $800bn (£620bn), reversing such an onslaught of negative press is no easy task. In Washington, DC, Google has hired a seasoned Republican lobbyist, Mark Isakowitz, to try to get on the right side of the equally scandal-prone Trump administration. It has ended its policy of forced arbitration for sexual harassment claims. And it has announced the appointment of an African-American woman, Robin Washington, to its previously all-male, all-billionaire Leadership Development And Compensation Committee. Schmidt’s departure from the board after 18 years was revealed in the same news release.
But the blows keep coming – including a recent US court ruling that means Google could owe $9bn (£6.8bn) to Oracle for copyright infringement related to the Android operating system and the €4.3bn (£3.6bn) fine from the European Union for abuse of Android’s market dominance. The Rubin scandal has also drawn attention to the company’s long-standing opposition to new US sex trafficking laws – which it believes could hamper free speech – and reports that Sergey Brin attended billionaires’ dinners with the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Most worryingly of all for Google, populist politicians now see the company as an easy target, with two-thirds of Americans supporting a break-up of “big tech”, according to a survey by Data For Progress. Little wonder, then, that parent company Alphabet launched an investigation in November 2019 into how it handles sexual harassment claims, while Pichai took over from the reclusive Page as Alphabet’s CEO.
All the while, technology marches on, with Google continuing to invest in robots that can think and learn ever-more like human beings, keenly aware that its dominance of the online advertising business may not always be a given. The days of the company developing Terminator-style humanoids, however, appear to be long gone – with Boston Dynamics, which made the shelf-stacking Atlas, offloaded to Japan’s SoftBank in 2017. Indeed, Google’s latest AI creation is the distinctly underwhelming TossingBot – a robotic arm that can sort through a basket of items, learn to identify each one, pick them up and throw them accurately across a factory floor into another basket.
To many Googlers, including Page and Brin, who remember the thrill and apprehension surrounding the launch of Android Andy’s Replicant project in 2013, the latest promotional video of TossingBot flinging around bananas must surely engender some mixed feelings. Relief, no doubt, that Google’s most aberrant of geniuses is long gone. But also sadness, knowing how much more terrifyingly cool it would all be were he still in charge.
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