Inside Google’s Secret Lab

As the polymath engineers and scientists of Google there are fond of saying, Google X is the search giant’s factory for moonshots, those million-to-one scientific bets that require generous amounts of capital, massive leaps of faith, and a willingness to break things. Google X  is home to the self-driving car initiative and the Internet-connected eyeglasses, Google Glass, among other improbable projects. For this Bloomberg Businessweek cover story , I got exclusive access to the skunk works and its leaders, whose mandate is to come up with technologies that sound more like plot contrivances from Star Trek than products that might satisfy the short-term demands of Google’s shareholders. “Google X is very consciously looking at things that Google in its right mind wouldn’t do,” says Richard DeVaul, a “rapid evaluator” at the lab. “They built the rocket pad far away from the widget factory, so if the rocket blows up, it’s hopefully not disrupting the core business.”