https://www.wired.com/story/the-2010s-killed-the-cult-of-the-tech-founder/

When Larry Page and Sergey Brin announced they were giving up their “day to day” duties at Alphabet early this month—leaving the heavy lifting to Google CEO Sundar Pichai—an era ended in more ways than one. As much as the news made history for the Mountain View search giant, it was also a fitting end to a cult of founderhood that peaked and crashed during the past 10 years.

At the beginning of this decade, "the Google Guys” were still the flag-bearers of that cult. From the time they started their company in the late 1990s, they gleefully drew the boxes that subsequent founder-savants would later check off: pursuing ideas that conventional wisdom deemed crazy; dismissing traditional business practices; and maintaining control of their company even after going public, bypassing oversight by granting themselves powerful voting shares.