The most valuable public company in the world has been on a hiring spree. As of Dec. 31, headcount at Alphabet, the new parent company for Google, stood at 61,814, up from 53,600 a year earlier.
The increase included 1,838 employees who were added to the payroll just in the fourth quarter—a slight slowdown from the 2,800 it added during the third quarter.
In its first earnings call since it reorganized itself as Alphabet, the company reported revenue of over $21 billion for the quarter—a jump of nearly 20% over the same quarter last year.
All that investment in human capital was a likely contributor to the $3.5 billion in operating losses reported for the company’s “other bets”—moonshot businesses such as self-driving cars, Google Fiber, and Google X. Including the core Google earnings, though, the results were considerably better—the company as a whole generated $4.92 billion of profit on total sales of $21.3 billion.