Susan Wojcicki obituary: chief executive of YouTube as it was reshaping entertainment and politics (2024)

Born July 5th, 1968

Died August 9th, 2024

Few people have had greater unseen influence on today’s younger generations than Susan Wojcicki, who has died aged 56 after suffering from lung cancer. From 2015 to 2023, Wojcicki was chief executive of the video-sharing platform YouTube, a subsidiary of the Google division of the US technology conglomerate Alphabet, increasing its revenues to more than $30 billion and its user base to nearly three billion, and watching it reshape entertainment and politics.

Her roots at Google went back to the company’s earliest days in 1998 when, as a cash-strapped student in California with mortgage debt and student loans, she sought to rent out a couple of rooms. The takers, at $1,700 a month, were Larry Page and Sergey Brin, whom she had met through a mutual friend and who were looking for cheap offices for their newly incorporated company. The following year, Wojcicki became Google’s first marketing manager and its 16th employee.

As chief executive of YouTube, Wojcicki found herself at the centre of numerous controversies as the site became an increasingly important way for individuals to propagate – and monetise – extreme content, misinformation, disinformation, dangerous don’t-try-this-at-home exploits, conspiracy theories and paedophilia to millions of viewers via the site’s algorithmic recommendation system.

In response she made changes to improve content moderation and keep advertisers from leaving the site by adding thousands of human moderators, changing the site’s recommendation algorithms to stop spreading dangerous content, and building systems to automate removing inappropriate comments, or videos such as that of the mass shootings at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019.

Nonetheless, many commentators felt she did not try hard enough to curb the spread of problematic material, and blamed the company for prioritising profits over the public interest.

Removing content brought its own dangers. In 2018 Wojcicki spent 40 minutes hiding from a woman with a gun, a YouTube user apparently furious over new ad standards, who had driven to YouTube’s headquarters in San Bruno, California, and who shot three people and then herself.

The anger the incident represents is still visible today; since Wojcicki’s death, while some have praised her philanthropy and kindness, others have lashed out at her “censorship”.

A particular source of ire seems to have been her decision during the Covid-19 pandemic to remove medical misinformation such as the movie Plandemic and to take her lead from the Centers for Disease Control, the US government’s health agency, in deciding what counted as medical misinformation.

In 2019 she admitted regretfully to the New York Times that her changes had not come soon enough and called aiming to set standards of responsibility “some of the most important work that I will do in my career”.

[Susan Wojcicki, internet pioneer at Google and YouTube, diesOpens in new window]

Born in Santa Clara, California, Wojcicki was the eldest of three daughters of Esther, a teacher and journalist, and Stanley, a professor of particle physics at Stanford University who had arrived in the US as a Polish refugee at the age of 12. She often paid tribute to the value of growing up on the Stanford campus surrounded by people who had passions they studied seriously.

After Henry M Gunn high school, Palo Alto, she went to Harvard University where, although studying literature and history, she discovered an unexpected interest in technology when she took a random holiday temp job in a start-up. The revelation of the impact new technology could have on the world led her to take a computer science course in her final year before graduating with honours in 1990.

She then completed an MS in economics at the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1993, and an MBA at the UCLA Anderson School of Management in 1998. That year she also married Dennis Troper, a financial consultant at Deloitte in San Francisco.

In 1999, Brin invited Wojcicki to join his fledgling company, which still had no revenue, and she abandoned a safe job in marketing at Intel despite being strapped for money, five months pregnant with her first child and warned off by friends saying “it’s just another search engine”. She knew it wasn’t, she has said, because one day when Google was down, she realised how dependent she had become on using it to look things up.

Lacking a fixed role at first, she looked around the company for opportunities. In the early years she helped develop the Doodles logo, and image search, and served as product manager for Google’s first advertising product, AdSense, and then others such as AdWords.

She led Google’s fast-growing advertising business, including overseeing the acquisition of the internet advertising pioneer DoubleClick in 2007. In addition, she campaigned to make paid parental leave a standard at Google and other companies. The former Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg has credited Wojcicki with helping her and many others learn the business.

As senior vice-president of advertising and commerce, and overseer of Google’s original video service, in 2006 Wojcicki recommended acquiring the year-old start-up YouTube. At the time, many thought the $1.65 billion Google paid was extravagant for a company with no business model. In 2023, YouTube generated $31.5 billion in revenue; more than 2.7 billion people access it at least once a month, and 100 million subscribe to its premium service.

“I care about the legacy we leave,” Wojcicki told the Guardian in 2019, when asked why she persisted in trying to solve the problem of dealing with extremist content. When she stepped down in 2023, she said it was to focus on “family, health, and personal projects I’m passionate about”.

She is survived by her husband; four of their five children; her sisters, Anne and Janet; and her mother.

– Guardian