Two founders built the largest information company in history. One of them then quietly deleted one of the three meals humans are told never to skip.
His is the thinnest-documented eating pattern of the ten, and it mostly arrives by way of other people. The version that recurs in the health press — a compressed eating window, lunch and dinner only, nothing before noon, breakfast simply deleted as a decision — gets attributed to an interview he is not on record as having given. Read it as reported, not quoted. What does hold up is the shape of it: no calorie counting, no protocol to sell, a schedule treated as an engineering constraint rather than a diet.
The older anecdote fits the same shape. During the early Google campus-building years, this founder asked that a supply of his personal smoothies be kept in the buildings’ kitchens — a man who lived more comfortably on liquids than solids. Reporters described a soft vegetarian phase. No keto, no fasting-app gospel, no biohacking lab. When other tech billionaires bought anti-ageing clinics, he bought an ageing company — Calico, launched in 2013 with the line that death is “very sad” and that the Google-scale answer would be to “attack it.”
Exercise is reported, never announced: a daily walk through the Palo Alto hills with colleagues, occasional yoga, a general restlessness that colleagues describe — pacing during meetings — rather than gym discipline. The one thing visible is the absence of the usual Silicon Valley performance: he does not photograph himself mid-marathon or brew his own beef supply.
What he does announce, occasionally, is the spending, and the impatience behind it: flying-car ventures, Calico, and a long-running public argument that the world is solving too small a set of problems too slowly. The pattern colleagues describe is a man who tests ideas — and, sometimes, his own habits — the way he would test a search ranking: a thousand small experiments, no announcement of the results.
Whether he still eats that way is, like most of what he does now, unannounced. He has not retracted it either.
His name is Larry Page. He is 53 years old, the third-richest person in the world at about $231 billion, and the man who decided breakfast was not a requirement.
Sources & citations
- Six-hour eating window — reported across health press (e.g. Hone Health’s intermittent-fasting round-up); original interview not located (checked Nov 2026) — treated as reported, not quoted
- Google cafeteria / smoothie anecdote — NYT and Vanity Fair coverage of Google’s campus years (2007–2012)
- Calico launch (2013) — “attack death” — Calico press coverage
- Net worth: Forbes Real-Time, Nov 2026
Part 5 of the series “What Billionaires Actually Eat.”