Former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki Dies at 56 of Lung Cancer

YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki attends a conference at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, in Cannes, France, June 19, 2018. (Reuters)
YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki attends a conference at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, in Cannes, France, June 19, 2018. (Reuters)
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Former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki Dies at 56 of Lung Cancer

YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki attends a conference at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, in Cannes, France, June 19, 2018. (Reuters)
YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki attends a conference at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, in Cannes, France, June 19, 2018. (Reuters)

YouTube's former chief executive and long-time Google executive Susan Wojcicki died on Saturday at the age of 56 after a two-year battle with lung cancer.

"It is with profound sadness that I share the news of Susan Wojcicki passing. My beloved wife of 26 years and mother to our five children left us today after 2 years of living with non-small cell lung cancer," Dennis Troper, Wojcicki's husband, said in a Facebook post.

"Over the last two years, even as she dealt with great personal difficulties, Susan devoted herself to making the world better through her philanthropy, including supporting research for the disease that ultimately took her life," Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai said in a blog post.

One of the most prominent women in tech, Wojcicki joined Google in 1999 to become one of the first few employees of the web search leader, years before it acquired YouTube.

Google bought YouTube in 2006 for $1.65 billion.

Before becoming CEO of YouTube in 2014, Wojcicki was senior vice president for ad products at Google.

After nine years at the helm, Wojcicki stepped down from her role at YouTube in 2023 to focus on "family, health, and personal projects". She was replaced by her deputy, Neal Mohan, a senior advertising and product executive who joined Google in 2008. Wojcicki at that time planned to take on an advisory role at Alphabet, Google's parent company.

"Twenty-five years ago, I made the decision to join a couple of Stanford graduate students who were building a new search engine. Their names were Larry and Sergey .... It would be one of the best decisions of my life," Wojcicki wrote in a blog post on the day she left YouTube, referring to Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

"Today we at YouTube lost a teammate, mentor, and friend, Susan Wojcicki," Mohan said in a post on X.



Video Game Performers Reach Agreement with 80 Video Games on AI Terms 

Striking SAG-AFTRA video game performers picket outside WB Games Inc. offices on August 28, 2024 in Burbank, California. (Getty Images/AFP)
Striking SAG-AFTRA video game performers picket outside WB Games Inc. offices on August 28, 2024 in Burbank, California. (Getty Images/AFP)
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Video Game Performers Reach Agreement with 80 Video Games on AI Terms 

Striking SAG-AFTRA video game performers picket outside WB Games Inc. offices on August 28, 2024 in Burbank, California. (Getty Images/AFP)
Striking SAG-AFTRA video game performers picket outside WB Games Inc. offices on August 28, 2024 in Burbank, California. (Getty Images/AFP)

After striking for over a month, video game performers have reached agreements with 80 games that have signed interim or tiered budget agreements with the performers' union and accepted the artificial intelligence provisions they have been seeking.

Members of the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists began striking in July after negotiations with game industry giants that began more than a year and a half ago came to a halt over AI protections. Union leaders say game voice actors and motion capture artists’ likenesses could be replicated by AI and used without their consent and without fair compensation.

SAG-AFTRA announced the agreements with the 80 individual video games on Thursday. Performers impacted by the work stoppage can now work on those projects.

The strike against other major video game publishers, including Disney and Warner Bros.' game companies and Electronic Arts Productions Inc., will continue.

The interim agreement secures wage improvements, protections around “exploitative uses” of artificial intelligence and safety precautions that account for the strain of physical performances, as well as vocal stress. The tiered budget agreement aims to make working with union talent more feasible for independent game developers or smaller-budget projects while also providing performers the protections under the interim agreement.

Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, SAG-AFTRA's national executive director and chief negotiator, said in a statement that companies signing the agreements are “helping to preserve the human art, ingenuity and creativity that fuels interactive storytelling.”

“These agreements signal that the video game companies in the collective bargaining group do not represent the will of the larger video game industry,” Crabtree-Ireland continued. “The many companies that are happy to agree to our AI terms prove that these terms are not only reasonable, but feasible and sustainable for businesses.”

The union announced Wednesday that game development studio Lightspeed L.A. has agreed to produce current and future games, including the popular title “Last Sentinel,” under the union's interim agreement, meaning it can also work with union talent as the strike persists.