“Larry Page, the co-founder of Google who is tying the knot today, on a private island in the Bahamas owned by his friend and best man, Sir Richard Branson…”
New York — Larry Page, Google’s billionaire co-founder, is set to marry his girlfriend, Lucy Southworth, on a tiny Caribbean island this weekend, a source familiar with the wedding arrangements said.
“Hundreds of guests – including politicians, rock stars and other luminaries – are expected to attend the ceremony on Necker Island, a tiny blob of land in the Virgin Islands with room to house just 28 people.”
Page, 34, the most eligible bachelor in America, is the son of Michigan State University professors and fifth-richest person in the US, will wed girlfriend Lucy Southworth, 27, on entrepreneur Richard Branson’s private getaway, Necker Island, sources familiar with the event confirmed.
“His personal wealth of $US18.5billion ($21.2billion) is larger than the GDP of Iceland.”
Page and Southworth, a biomedical informatics (information processing) doctoral student at Stanford, have been dating for over a year.
Since 2003, Southworth has been a doctoral student in biomedical informatics at Stanford University. She graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2001 and holds a master’s of science degree from Oxford University.
The wedding was supposed to be completely hush-hush, with even wedding guests left largely in the dark about where they were heading. Invitations offered only a date, and a stipulation that everyone should have a valid passport.
The 600 guests at the wedding, at which Sir Richard will be best man, had for months been told only that they needed a valid passport for the weekend of December 8.
Most of the guests will be staying on another private island, Virgin Gorda, which is a 10-minute boat ride away. But to secure accommodations for their guests, Page’s planners, working six months in advance. Hotel space on Gorda has been booked up for months, and the entire place is expected to be given over to Googlemania.
No one except Page’s guests is staying at Little Dix Bay Resort on Virgin Gorda “so that Page’s wedding could be completely private,” said an insider. “They rented all of Virgin Gorda. They took over the island.”
The source also said “boats and ferries for hundreds of guests were ordered to ship them from Little Dix Bay to the ceremony.”
Although the guest list is a closely-guarded secret, the list includes former US President Bill Clinton, his wife and presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton, who are expected to attend even though Hillary is falling behind in the polls less than a month away from the first primary in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.
“Also attending will be the U2 frontman Bono.”
Bono, the globe-trotting U2 frontman, was said to be the most prominent guest, but the lists also includes fellow Forbes 400 billionaires, Silicon Valley visionaries and friends from Stanford are thought to have been invited, where Page and his Google partner, Sergey Brin, met in the computer science Ph.D. program.
Also, Al Gore was invited but had to send his regrets because he will be traveling to Oslo to pick up the Nobel Peace Prize -– one of the better no-show excuses in the etiquette book.
In this web-friendly age, billionaires, politicians, and others who live in the public eye have hard time keeping information about their lives private. Because the public is so interested in the marriages of the rich and famous, every detail of a billionaire’s personal life — from courtship to wedding to, if they are unlucky, divorce — ends up shooting through millions of fused networks and popping up on millions of strangers’ computer screens. It is true if you are Bill Gates of Microsoft, Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway, or Oprah Winfrey of Harpo Entertainment and Page is no exception.
A second source said that Page, who is estimated to be worth about $20 billion, is also springing for private planes to fly in guests from around the globe. “Planes are leaving from all over,” said the insider. “One plane will leave from New York on Friday.”
Page and Brin were each worth just $4 billion in 2004, before they took the company public. Shares have rocketed up 510 percent since then. Last May, the Russian-born Brin married Anne Wojcicki, a biotech analyst and a Yale graduate, in the Bahamas.
Page and Brin recently bought a pre-owned Qantas Boeing 767 airliner for their business and personal needs. Page is also an investor in Tesla Motors, which developed the Tesla Roadster, a 250-mile-range battery electric vehicle.
“Google spokesman Matt Furman had no comment.”
Having only dated for a year, it is not known if the happy couple has signed a pre-nuptial agreement.
Prenuptial agreements are important, but they are no guarantee of a satisfactory split if things go south. Consider the divorce of Steven Spielberg, now at DreamWorks Animation, and his first wife Amy Irving. He claimed their prenup was invalid because it had been written on a napkin and she had not had legal representation. A judge tossed it out; Irving got $100 million (€68.2m).
Attorneys familiar with billionaire marriages urge their clients to proceed with care and caution.
“Given all of the billionaire marriages that have ended badly, Page may well have a prenup ready. Money does not buy happiness, even if you are capable of spending billions.”