Sergey Brin is a Russian-American billionaire and the world’s sixth-richest person as of September 2025. ¹ Brin is best known as the co-founder of Google and its parent company Alphabet. Brin founded Google in the late 1990s with Larry Page, a friend and fellow classmate in the Stanford University computer science Ph.D. program. Google has since become one of the most powerful technology companies in the world, and the company’s success has made Brin and Page among the world’s richest individuals. ²

Brin led Google and Alphabet as president of the companies from Google’s founding in 1998 until December 2019, when Brin and Page both announced that they would be stepping away from daily operations while staying active with the company as board members and controlling shareholders. ³ Brin returned to daily operations at Google in late 2022 after OpenAI released the artificial intelligence program ChatGPT to work on Google’s DeepMind AI division. ⁴

Though Brin is not often seen in the public eye and is considered to have a relatively low profile,⁵ Brin is active in philanthropic giving and has donated substantial sums of money to left-leaning political organizations and causes. Brin has also made donations to Democratic organizations, including the Democratic National Committee and former President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign. ⁶ Brin supports other left-of-center causes through the Google Foundation and the Sergey Brin Family Foundation. ⁷

Background

Sergey Brin was born in 1973 in Moscow. Brin’s father was a Jewish math professor in Moscow and his mother was a research scientist. His family left Russia in 1979 to escape the persecution of Jews by the Soviet regime and ultimately settled in the United States. Brin attended the University of Maryland-College Park, earning an undergraduate degree in mathematics and computer science before attending Stanford to pursue graduate computer science studies. ⁸

While at Stanford, Brin met Larry Page, and the two developed a friendship centered around arguments over their views on mathematics, computers, and other various issues such as urban planning. The two began to work on a project together to rank pages based on how often they were linked to one other on parts of the World Wide Web. Brin and Page developed a web crawler that would pull links among the estimated 10 million web pages on the internet at the time, and Brin developed an algorithm that would rank those webpages based on importance. The PageRank algorithm led to the creation of the Google search engine, which led Page and Brin to take a leave of absence from Stanford’s Ph.D. computer science program to pursue Google as a business. ⁹

In the years since founding Google, Brin and Page both have been known to maintain relatively low profiles despite their billionaire status. One of Brins most memorable public appearances while leading the company was at the 2012 unveiling of Google Glass, a wearable glasses-like computer device that was developed by the Google SkunkWorks lab called Google X, which Brin led. The demonstration was hailed as one of the most elaborate product demos since the unveiling of the iPhone and featured skydivers jumping into the demonstration while live streaming the jump via Google Glass. The Google Glass device ultimately failed over bad publicity, concerns over privacy, and design flaws. ¹⁰

In July 2023, a lawsuit filed by the U.S. Virgin Islands against JP Morgan Chase which alleged the bank benefited from sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein’s criminal activities. The lawsuit further alleged that Epstein had introduced Brin to Jes Staley, a former executive at JP Morgan Chase. Brin was also accused of becoming a client of JP Morgan’s San Francisco private bank while bringing $4 billion in investments to the bank as a result. Brin would be subpoenaed by the U.S. Virgin Islands as a part of the territory’s lawsuit. ¹¹

Artificial Intelligence

After stepping away from daily operations in 2019, Brin returned to Google in late 2022 after OpenAI released ChatGPT as a part of the tech sector’s development on generative AI whereas Brin worked on Google’s DeepMind AI division.  In 2024, Brin argued that he “kind of came out of retirement, just because the trajectory of AI is so exciting.” ⁴

In 2025, Brin published an internal memo to Google’s employees working in Gemini, the company’s slate of AI products, which promoted the idea of them working 60 hours a week. Brin further recommended a longer work week as a part of the company’s efforts to develop their AI software faster than the competition. Brin also required Gemini employees to be in the office every weekday and warned against working more than 60 hours a week to avoid burnout. Brin also encouraged Gemini’s workers to use its AI technology to make their coding more efficient. ⁴

In May 2025, Brin, while being interviewed by the All-In Podcast, made the argument that AI works better when you threaten it. He alleged, “[a]ll models tend to do better if you threaten them… [b]ut…people feel weird about that, so we don’t really talk about that.”  ¹²

Personal Life

Affair

In 2014, Brin was caught in a public scandal after having an extramarital affair with Amanda Rosenberg, the marketing manager for the Google Glass product. The affair led to controversy at the Google campus and among Silicon Valley tech circles and led Brin and his then-wife, 23&Me founder Anne Wojcicki, to divorce. Prior to their divorce, Brin and Wojcicki had ranked among the top 10 most charitable couples in the world through philanthropic giving from the couple’s family foundation ¹³

Anne Wojcicki is also the sister of Susan Wojcicki, an early employee of Google who offered her garage to Brin and Page to start the company. Susan Wojcicki pushed for the early acquisition of YouTube and worked as YouTube CEO before stepping aside after a cancer diagnosis that would ultimately prove fatal. ¹⁴ The fallout from Brin’s affair reportedly led Page to not speak to Brin for some time ¹³

Second Marriage

In July 2014, Brin met Nicole Shanahan at a yoga festival, weeks before Shanahan married Jeremy Kranz. Kranz later found text messages between Brin and Shanahan a few days after they married in August 2014. Kranz filed for annulment of the marriage but later settled for a divorce with Shanahan. ¹⁵

In 2018, Brin married Shanahan. The two began seeing each other in 2015 and they had a daughter together. In June 2022, Brin filed for divorce claiming “irreconcilable differences.” The two had been separated since December 2021. ¹⁶

In September 2023, the divorce was finalized. The couple had signed a prenuptial agreement that stipulated that in the event of a divorce, details such as spousal support and the division of property would be settled in confidential arbitration. The two would share legal and physical custody of their daughter. The New York Post alleged that the reason for the divorce was an affair between Elon Musk and Shanahan, which both Musk and Shanahan deny. ¹⁷

In May 2024, the New York Times reported that during her marriage to Brin, Shanahan attended, “parties with other tech executives in Silicon Valley where she consumed recreational drugs including cocaine, ketamine and psychedelic mushrooms.” The Times also reported that tensions had developed in the marriage due to lockdowns during the COVID-19 Pandemic after Shanahan’s and Brin’s daughter had been diagnosed with autism. Shanahan reportedly walked away with roughly $1 billion in settlement from the divorce. ¹⁵

Plane Crash

In May 2023, Brin requested that his pilots fly his private plane from Santa Rosa to Fiji, where Brin was on his private island. Brin planned on using the plane to go “island hopping” with friends. The pilots, Lance Maclean and Dean Rushfeldt, were killed when the airplane crashed into the Pacific Ocean and their families filed separate wrongful death lawsuits against Brin and his companies. In May 2025, the Rushfeldt family reached a confidential agreement to settle the lawsuit for an undisclosed amount of money. The Maclean family demanded a jury trial and alleged that Brin’s agents ordered the Seafly company to ready the ferry flight and that one of the mechanics had illegally altered an installed ferry fuel system and that the ferry fuel system failed and that had caused the crash. ¹⁸

Political Views

After the 2016 election, the right-wing website Breitbart leaked a video of a group meeting of Google executives that showed Page and Brin criticizing the election results and then-President-elect Donald Trump to a room full of employees. ¹⁹

Brin donated $100,000 in support of state recognition of same-sex marriage²⁰ and personally donated to former President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign and to the Democratic National Committee. Brin has also contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to left-of-center voter mobilization group My Ride to Vote. ⁶

In May 2025, Brin donated over $100,000 to the Republican National Committee. ²¹

As a leader at Google, Brin directed giving through the Google Foundation, also known as Google.org. The Google Foundation is a major funder of left-of-center advocacy initiatives²², having contributed at least $70 million in the decade between 2007 and 2016 to organizations such as the Tides Foundation, a provider of ideologically left-of-center donor-advised funds; Netroots, an annual conference of left-of-center bloggers; and the Natural Resources Defense Council, a left-of-center environmentalist organization. ²³

Prior to his divorce from Anne Wojcicki, Brin and his wife supported charities jointly through the Brin Wojcicki Foundation. Despite the couple’s divorce, the Foundation still gifted nearly $50 million in 2018, mostly to San Francisco Bay Area community organizations and education nonprofits such as College Track and K to College. The Foundation also made grants to the Human Rights Foundation, the Tony Blair Foundation, and the Wikimedia Foundation. ²⁴

In 2014, in light of his separation from Wojcicki, Brin founded the Sergey Brin Family Foundation, which holds over $1.4 billion in assets, mostly in the form of Google stock. The foundation gave nearly $60 million in grants in 2015. Grant recipients included many California-based schools, libraries, and educational programs, in addition to a variety of left-leaning organizations such as the Proteus Fund, the Tides Foundation, ProgressNow Colorado, and the NAACP Foundation. ²⁵

In late 2021, Brin seeded the group Catalyst4 and as of 2025, he had been giving more to the group than his traditional family foundation. Brin helped set up Catalyst4 as a 501(c)(4) which would allow the group to lobby government officials in addition to making donations. Catalyst4 was established to fund research into Parkinson’s Disease, autism, and other health conditions and environmentalist programs. As of 2023, the group donated to the Michael J. Fox Foundation to support its research into combating Parkinsons but also donated to left-leaning groups such as the Arabella Advisors-managed Sixteen Thirty Fund, Energy Action Fund, Tides Advocacy, Fund for a Better Future, and Partnership Project Action Fund. In May 2025, Brin gave away $700 million worth of Google stock, with nearly $550 million of it going to Catalyst4 with another $100 million going to his family foundation with the rest going to the Michael J. Fox Foundation. ²⁶ Brin initially seeded the group with $366 million raised from the sale of Tesla stock. Brin himself is not a part of the group’s leadership but the group contains board members from his investment firm, Bayshore Global Management. ²⁷

In July 2025, Brin called the United Nations “transparently antisemitic” in an internal Google chat. He reportedly stated “With all due respect, throwing around the term genocide in relation to Gaza is deeply offensive to many Jewish people who have suffered actual genocides.” A spokesperson for Brin told the Washington Post that he was commenting on an internal discussion of a “plainly biased and misleading report.” ²⁸

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