Google co-founder and CEO Larry Page says he'd rather leave his savings to inventor Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and founder of Tesla, when he dies than to a charity.
That was just one of many interesting statements Page made at the 2014 TED talk with 40-year-old billionaire on Wednesday in Vancouver. He sat down with Charlie Rose to discuss his vision for the future and what Google is working on, noting we're still in the early days of search, and that driverless cars are closer to a reality than we think.

But Page spent a good bit of time discussing Musk's aspirations to send humans to Mars “to back up humanity." He called the move "philanthropical."
"[Musk] wants to go to Mars. That’s a worthy goal," Page said, as outlined on TED's website. "We have a lot of employees at Google who’ve become pretty wealthy. You’re working because you want to change the world and make it better; if the company you work for is worthy of your time, why not your money as well? We just don’t think about that. I’d like for us to help out more than we are."
Page, who has been battling a chronic condition that has impacted his voice, also discussed the power of sharing personal data to help others. Specifically, he believes patients should give their medical data to researchers to save lives.
"When I lost my voice I thought, wouldn’t it be amazing if everyone’s medical conditions were available anonymously to medical doctors? You could see what doctors accessed it and why, and learn more about conditions you have," he said. "I was scared to share this voice stuff, but Sergey persuaded me, and it’s been really positive. I got all this information, I got a survey done, got medical conditions from people with similar issues. We’re not thinking about the tremendous good that could come from sharing the right information with the right people in the right ways."
Page also hinted at Google's much-anticipated driverless car concept, noting we're "very" close to seeing them hit the market: "We’ve driven well over 100,000 miles by now," he said.
In addition to revealing his visions for the future, Page discussed the challenges that lie ahead, emphasizing there's still work to be done for computers to truly understand its users.
"Computing’s kind of a mess," he said. "Your computer doesn’t know where you are, what you know, what you’re doing. We’re trying to make devices work, to understand your context and what you might need. We’re just starting to work on Android Wear, for example. Having computing understand you — we haven’t done that yet. It’s still very clunky."
Although Google has expanded into many areas beyond search — such as Google and Android — it's still working hard to improve search.
"The mission that we defined a long time ago was to organize the world’s information and make it usable and accessible," he said. "Now people always ask me: Is that still what you’re doing? And I’m not quite sure. But search really is such a deep thing for us. To really understand what you want, to really understand the world’s information — we’re still very much at the early stages of that. We’ve been doing this for 15 years already, but it’s not at all done."
Google has certainly shifted its focus beyond search too, but this is something that didn't sit well with Page at first.
"When I was working on Android, I felt guilty," he said. "It wasn’t what we were working on, it was a start-up, and I felt guilty. That was stupid! It was the future."
The company continues to get its hands wet in other areas, most recently with an initiative called Project Loon, which uses balloons: "It sounds crazy, but two-thirds of the world’s people won’t have access to good Internet, and we thought: How can we get access points up cheaply? It’s so easy to launch a balloon," Page said.
Privacy has long been a main topic for discussion among Google users, but Page stressed the importance of security and keeping user data safe.
"You carry a phone, and there’s so much information about you, so it makes sense why people are asking difficult questions," he said. The main thing is we need to provide people with choices, show them what data’s being collected: search history, location data. I’m really excited about incognito mode. But I’m worried about throwing the baby out with the bathwater."
Page also called the recent NSA revelations "disappointing."
"For me, it’s tremendously disappointing that the government secretly did all this and didn’t tell us," Page said. "We can’t have democracy if we’re having to protect you and our users from the government over stuff we’ve never had a conversation about. We need to know what the parameters are, what kind of surveillance the government is going to do and how and why."
Despite the gloom surrounding surveillance, Page is hopeful that corporations will take charge and steer the industry in the right direction toward innovation.
"Most people think corporations are basically evil. They get a bad rap," he said. "And that’s somewhat correct, if companies are doing the same incremental things they did 20 years ago. But that’s not really what we need. Especially in tech, we need revolutionary change, not incremental change."
Have something to add to this story? Share it in the comments.