X sends a corporate signal, both internally and externally, that Page and Brin are still nurturing the idealism with which they founded what is now basically an advertising company. Several business scholars have argued that Google’s domination of the market for search advertising is so complete that it should be treated as a monopoly. In June, the European Union slapped Google with a $2.7 billion antitrust fine for promoting its own shopping sites at the expense of competitors. Alphabet might use the projects at X to argue that it is a benevolent giant willing to spend its surplus on inventions that enrich humanity, much like AT&T did with Bell Labs.

All of that said, X’s soft benefits and theoretical valuations can go only so far; at some point, Alphabet must determine whether X’s theories of failure, experimentation, and invention work in practice. After several days marinating in the company’s idealism, I still wondered whether X’s insistence on moonshots might lead it to miss the modest innovations that typically produce the most-valuable products. I asked Astro Teller a mischievous question: Imagine you are participating in a Rapid Eval session in the mid-1990s, and somebody says she wants to rank every internet page by influence. Would he champion the idea? Teller saw right through me: I was referring to PageRank, the software that grew into Google. He said, “I would like to believe that we would at least go down the path” of exploring a technology like PageRank. But “we might have said no.”

I then asked him to imagine that the year was 2003, and an X employee proposed digitizing college yearbooks. I was referring to Facebook, now Google’s fiercest rival for digital-advertising revenue. Teller said he would be even more likely to reject that pitch. “We don’t go down paths where the hard stuff is marketing, or understanding how people get dates.” He paused. “Obviously there are hard things about what Facebook is doing. But digitizing a yearbook was an observation about connecting people, not a technically hard challenge.”

X has a dual mandate to solve huge problems and to build the next Google, two goals that Teller considers closely aligned. And yet Facebook grew to rival Google, as a platform for advertising and in financial value, by first achieving a quotidian goal. It was not a moonshot but rather the opposite—a small step, followed by another step, and another.

Insisting on quick products and profits is the modern attitude of innovation that X continues to quietly resist. For better and worse, it is imbued with an appreciation for the long gestation period of new technology.

Technology is a tall tree, John Fernald told me. But planting the seeds of invention and harvesting the fruit of commercial innovation are entirely distinct skills, often mastered by different organizations and separated by many years. “I don’t think of X as a planter or a harvester, actually,” Fernald said. “I think of X as building taller ladders. They reach where others cannot.” Several weeks later, I repeated the line to several X employees. “That’s perfect,” they said. “That’s so perfect.” Nobody knows for sure what, if anything, the employees at X are going to find up on those ladders. But they’re reaching. At least someone is.