The ambitions of Brin and Page, Google's 34-year-old founders, are pretty much boundless. Sure, they've already revolutionized - okay, massively disrupted - the advertising industry. But the billionaires aren't stopping there. They've set their sights on altering how mobile telephones work, fixing climate change, utterly redefining the very nature of work, that sort of thing.
Preposterous? Actually, there's a method to their madness. Despite endless predictions that Google would run itself off the rails, the duo, along with CEO Eric Schmidt, have shown a good deal of management maturity. They've been willing to build (AdWords, their search-based advertising service) as well as buy (YouTube). And they've defied critics who said they couldn't operate their company for the long term.
--Adam Lashinsky
