Page and Brin were the first to introduce a dual-class share structure to the tech sector with Google’s 2004 public offering. The two would control the super-class “B” voting stock, shares that each carried ten votes, as compared to the “A” class of shares, which each carried only one vote. This arrangement inoculated Page and Brin from market and investor pressures, as Page wrote in the “Founder’s Letter” issued with the IPO: “In the transition to public ownership, we have set up a corporate structure that will make it harder for outside parties to take over or influence Google.… The main effect of this structure is likely to leave our team, especially Sergey and me, with increasingly significant control over the company’s decisions and fate, as Google shares change hands.”

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 322