Last week, during Google’s annual shareholders meeting, executive chairman Eric Schmidt announced that CEO Larry Page would be absent from the meeting because he had “lost his voice”.
Seems perfectly normal to me, people get colds and lose their voices, and all kinds of other things. Then Schmidt further explained that Page would also be absent from this week’s developer conference and the second quarter financial analysis taking place in July. That’s when I lost faith that Schmidt was telling the truth.
If I get a cold, or lose my voice in late June, I don’t cancel my events planned for the next three weeks, most colds don’t last that long. Let’s be honest folks, Larry Page isn’t a pop singer, he’s a CEO. I’m not the only one who isn’t buying it.
According to CNN Money, the absents of Page is making investors nervous and hurting their confidence in the company. The disruption comes at a time when Google’s stock isn’t performing all that well. While still a valuable investments, shares are down 13% from last year.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Page sent around an email on Thursday to the Google staff explaining he was fine and and would continue to run the company as normal. But, as you can imagine, investors and shareholders are already calling around asking questions and speculating about the true reason for Page’s absence.
Certain publication have already begun to guess what vocal problems Page could be facing, speculating everything from acute laryngitis, a viral infection, to muscle tension dysphonia, which occurs when the muscles around the larynx are too tight causing undue physical stress while speaking.
It’s definitely too early to say if anything is truly wrong, but it seems like big companies are notoriously bad at lying these days, and if there’s a reason to think something’s up, it’s because something is up. We’ll keep you posted as more news becomes available.