Google CEO Sundar Pichai testifies in Ozy Media founder's fraud trial
Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, said in a New York courtroom Friday that he never discussed a possible takeover of Ozy Media.
Pichai is the highest-profile witness to testify so far in the trial of Carlos Watson, the founder of Ozy who is accused of misrepresenting his company's financial results, funding and audience data to investors and lenders from 2018 to 2021.
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Offering CollegeCourseWebsiteMIT xPROMIT Technology Leadership and InnovationVisitIndian School of BusinessProfessional Certificate in Product ManagementVisitIIT DelhiCertificate Programme in Data Science & Machine LearningVisit The government alleged in court filings and at trial that Watson falsely claimed to a prospective investor that Ozy had received a $600 million takeover offer from Google. (While the indictment omitted the name of the company, witnesses and documents presented at trial made it clear that Watson had referred to the search giant.)
Pichai said he interviewed Watson in February 2021 for a full-time role managing Google's relationships with news publishers. To accept the role, Watson would have had to step down from Ozy, which Google recognized could harm the digital media startup, another Google executive testified Thursday. As part of the hiring discussions, Google considered investing about $25 million in Ozy «to help with the transition,» Pichai testified when he briefly took the stand.
But Pichai drew a clear distinction between what Google had actually considered and
