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.

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.