Earlier this month, Sundar Pichai was struggling to write a letter to Alphabet’s 180,000 employees. The 51-year-old CEO wanted to laud Google on its 25th birthday, which could have been easy enough. Alphabet’s stock market value was around $1.7 trillion. Its vast cloud-computing operation had turned its first profit. Its self-driving cars were ferrying people around San Francisco. And then there was the usual stuff—Google Search still dominated the field, as it had for every minute of this century. The company sucks up almost 40 percent of all global digital advertising revenue.
But not all was well on Alphabet’s vast Mountain View campus. The
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