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Google is primarily a capitalist corporation and by definition not altruistic. It's accountable to its shareholders; if the CEO couldn't make a case for e.g. how employees spending part of their time on side projects somehow benefits the bottom line, this liberty wouldn't be allowed.

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Google employees own >50% of voting rights of the company stock. They aren't subject to external interests in the same way most other public companies are.

On a tangent, why shouldn't we celebrate projects that benefit both private and public interests? IMO, society would be quite a bit better if the two were more often aligned (like you suggest they may be in this case).

And employees want to see the stock grow. Right?

I wasn't implying that it's bad when private and public interests are aligned. What I'm saying is that this is not the same as altruism, and if private and public interests are at odds, the private ones will likely win as they have before at Google. This is just the nature of a capitalist company. Let's not have illusions about that.

While obviously, yes, we are a public company and aligned with shareholder value, you are vastly underestimating the core of the altruism in the Googlers doing this work (and working on Elections, and G4NP and so on)...and who are also a large amount of the shareholders involved.

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