Sundar Pichai: Google's rising star reaches the top (like his teacher said he would)

The creation this week of Alphabet has put the 43-year-old in the driver's seat of a slimmed-down Google, giving him the authority to put his ambition to the test

Last weekend, one of the most glittering alumni of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Kharagpur did not show up to give a school prize as he had promised. Sundar Pichai, then head of product at Google, begged off for reasons that became abundantly clear over the next few days: he had just been promoted to chief executive, and he had work to do.

The tech industry has seen its share of strange corporate maneuvers, but Google's realignment this week has to be among the strangest. The company pulled off a sort of upside-down merger with itself, in effect creating a holding company called Alphabet that runs a mega-profitable company called Google on the one hand and a dozen other money-losers and long-odds bets that Google has called "moonshots" on the other.