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Bad news, girls. Larry Page, the world’s only remaining bachelor Google billionaire, is getting married tomorrow.
Mr Page, 34, the son of Michigan State University professors, is the fifth-richest person in the US. His personal wealth of $18.5 billion (£9 billion) is larger than the GDP of Iceland.
As for those who believe they may still be in with a chance — there are at least 24 hours left before the ceremony begins on Necker Island, which is owned by Sir Richard Branson and costs $46,000 a night to hire — they should probably brush up on their knowledge of eukaryotic organisms.
This, after all, is the research topic and preferred dinner table conversation of Lucy Southworth, Mr Page’s fiancée, a 27-year-old doctoral student in biomedical informatics at Stanford University. Ms Southworth previously studied at Oxford, where she gained an MSc. The pair have reportedly been together for over a year. It is not known if she has signed a prenuptial agreement.
The 600 guests at the wedding — at which Sir Richard will be best man — were told for months that they needed only a valid passport for the weekend of December 8. Now it has emerged that the ceremony will take place on Necker, a 74-acre Caribbean paradise bought by the Virgin Records founder in the 1970s, largely because of its location in the fittingly named British Virgin Islands.
The island sleeps only a handful people. Most of the guests are therefore expected to stay a mile away at the Little Dix Bay Resort on the neighbouring island of Virgin Gorda. Mr Page’s wedding planners worked for six months to book every hotel room on the island, to ensure absolute privacy. “They rented all of Virgin Gorda,” one source told the Page 6 gossip column of the New York Post. “They took over the island.”
The wedding planners have also booked private aircraft at airports across the globe to make sure that guests can make it to the ceremony on time. Those still hoping to gatecrash may use Mr Page’s Google Maps service to locate Necker.
Over recent years, Mr Page and Sir Richard — the young, T-shirted geek and the middle-aged, baggy-jumpered adventurer — have developed an unlikely friendship in the global billionaires’ club. But the two men are close. Mr Page enlisted the services of Google Earth to help Sir Richard to search for his friend Steve Fossett, whose aircraft vanished in September.
Although the names of wedding guests remain a closely guarded secret, it is thought that the collective wealth on the island over the weekend could easily exceed one tenth of a trillion dollars. Silicon Valley billionaires will mix with elderly relatives, rock stars and still-broke college friends from Stanford, where Mr Page studied computer science. Some of the few confirmed names include Bono and Bill and Hillary Clinton.
Mr Page co-founded Google in 1998 with Sergey Brin, his Russian-born classmate, also 34, and also worth $18.5 billion. Since going public in 2004, Google’s shares have risen sevenfold in value and the company is valued at a quarter of a trillion dollars.
The two students reportedly took an instant dislike to each other at Stanford before they bonded over a mutual love of retrieving relevant information from large data sets. Together, they authored the now-classic paper, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine. In the academic world, the paper is the equivalent of a bestseller, being the tenth-most-accessed scientific paper at Stanford.
Mr Brin — tied with Mr Page for the place of fifth-richest person in the US — married Anne Wojcicki in the Bahamas this year. Ms Wojcicki is a graduate of Yale University graduate and the founder of 23andMe, a DNA-reading service that allows people to discover how likely they are to develop certain diseases.
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