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Driverless taxis to cancer drugs: Google's moonshots are serious business

Alphabet could be underinvesting in the sustainability of its prosperous main business while overinvesting in adventurous sidelines.

More than half of that “Other Bets” valuation, though, would come from Waymo LLC, the self-driving taxi company whose chief executive officer John Krafcik stepped down last month.
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More than half of Alphabet's 'Other Bets' valuation come from Waymo LLC, a self-driving taxi company. (Photo: Bloomberg.)

Leonid Bershidsky | Bloomberg
When Google renamed itself Alphabet Inc. in 2015, co-founder Larry Page revealed that one of the new name’s meanings was a pun: alpha-bet, as in “a bet on investment returns above a benchmark.” This implied that the so-called “Other Bets” in Google’s financial reports — subsidiaries that work on projects ranging from self-driving cars to cancer cures — aren’t just moonshot bids to make the world better, but potential businesses with better-than-average returns.

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