THE wedding this Saturday of Google co-founder Larry Page on a tiny Caribbean island is a logistical nightmare for planners who are flying in 600 guests on private planes and trying to find deluxe hotel rooms for all the bigwigs. Page, 34, the most eligible bachelor in America, will wed girlfriend Lucy Southworth, 27, on entrepreneur Richard Branson’s private getaway, Necker Island, sources confirmed to Page Six.
Page and Southworth, a biomedical informatics (information processing) doctoral student at Stanford, have been dating for over a year. But to secure accommodations for their guests, Page’s planners, working six months in advance, also had to book all the hotels on the neighboring island of Virgin Gorda. No one except Page’s guests is staying at Little Dix Bay Resort on Virgin Gorda “so that Page’s wedding could be completely private,” said an insider. “They rented all of Virgin Gorda. They took over the island.” The source also said “boats and ferries for hundreds of guests were ordered to ship them from Little Dix Bay to the ceremony.” Bono, the globe-trotting U2 frontman, was said to be the most prominent guest, but the lists also includes fellow Forbes 400 billionaires, Silicon Valley visionaries and friends from Stanford, where Page and his Google partner, Sergey Brin, met in the computer science Ph.D. program.
A second source said that Page, who’s estimated to be worth about $20 billion, is also springing for private planes to fly in guests from around the globe. “Planes are leaving from all over,” said the insider. “One plane will leave from New York on Friday.” Page and Brin were each worth just $4 billion in 2004, before they took the company public. Shares have rocketed up 510 percent since then. Last May, the Russian-born Brin married Anne Wojcicki, a biotech analyst and a Yale graduate, in the Bahamas. Page and Brin recently bought a pre-owned Qantas Boeing 767 airliner for their business and personal needs. Page is also an investor in Tesla Motors, which developed the Tesla Roadster, a 250-mile-range battery electric vehicle. Google spokesman Matt Furman had no comment.
