Sergey Brin’s life and career, from USSR refugee to billionaire Google cofounder

Brin might have a sizable net worth now, valued at $128 billion as of September 12, per the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, but the tech mogul comes from humble beginnings. He was born in the Soviet Union during the summer of 1973.

Brin’s father was an economist who had bigger aspirations than the USSR allowed at that time. His father dreamed of being an astrophysicist, but his Jewish background and the USSR’s antisemitism kept him from those ambitions.

Brin’s family managed to get exit visas and flee the country when Brin was 6. But his family’s stressful, troubled experience left him with a lasting appreciation for democracy and freedom.

The Brin family ended up in Maryland, where the Google cofounder was enrolled in a Montessori school — like Larry Page — that emphasized independence and fostering creativity.

Brin didn’t revisit Moscow until he was 17, during a class trip led by his father. “Thank you for taking us all out of Russia,” Brin told his dad, a former math professor at the University of Maryland.

Spurred on by a blossoming defiant streak, he threw pebbles at a police car while in Russia and almost got in serious trouble when the officers inside noticed.

Brin and Larry Page create Google

Some of Brin’s projects at Google include self-driving cars now known as Waymo, smart contact lenses, and smart glasses.

As Google ballooned from simply a search engine to a massive corporation with dozens of diverse projects, Brin became the mastermind behind some of its most ambitious ones as the head of Google X, the company’s innovative moonshot factory.

Brin was a big proponent of Google Glass — Google’s failed attempt at launching smart glasses.

For a long time, you couldn’t spot Brin without the computerized Google Glass smart glasses.

Brin reportedly played a big role in the product’s rocky launch in 2012, but famously, it was rushed into the world before it was ready for public scrutiny.

Brin also worked on Google’s now-dismantled social network, Google Plus.

He admitted onstage in 2014 that he should have never worked on it because he’s “kind of a weirdo” and not very social.

“It was probably a mistake for me to be working on anything tangentially related to social to begin with,” Brin said in 2014.

He has maintained an eclectic presence at Google since its beginning.

Brin’s fashion style is well-known around the Google campus

In 2007, Brin married Anne Wojcicki, the CEO of the genetics company 23andMe. For the wedding, the couple invited guests to a secret location in the Bahamas and wore bathing suits for the ceremony, which reportedly took place on a sandbar.

Anne Wojcicki is also the sister of early Google employee — and former YouTube CEO — Susan Wojcicki, who died in August after living with lung cancer.

Brin and Anne Wojcicki have two children together. Both kids have the last name Wojin, a portmanteau of their parents’ last names.

Parkinson’s runs in Brin’s family, so he does what he can to lower his likelihood of getting the disease. Brin and Wojcicki donated hundreds of millions of dollars to charity, including to Parkinson’s research. A test through 23andMe revealed that Brin has a genetic mutation that makes him predisposed to the disease.

To lower his chances of developing it, Brin started exercising even more intensely and drinking green tea twice a day. Due to his health regimen and scientific progress, he estimated in 2010 that he now has only about a 10% chance of getting the disease.

Brin’s marriage to Wojcicki hit the rocks in 2013, and the couple separated. Around the time of his separation with Wojcicki, Brin had reportedly started an affair with a Google employee who was also in a relationship with another high-level Google executive at the same time.

Brin and Wojcicki officially finalized their divorce in June 2015 after eight years of marriage.

The 2018 book “Valley of Genius” described Brin as “the Google playboy” during the company’s early days.

“He was known for getting his fingers caught in the cookie jar with employees that worked for the company in the masseuse room,” a former employee said. “He got around.”

In 2018, Brin married Nicole Shanahan, a lawyer and the founder of a legal-tech startup. Shanahan was also selected by presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr to be his running mate. Brin and Shanahan met in 2015 at a yoga retreat. They had a baby girl together the same year they wed.

In August 2015, Brin’s title got a major upgrade when Google underwent a major restructuring.

Brin transitioned from director of special projects at the moonshot division, Google X, to become the president of Alphabet, Google’s new parent company. Page was named Alphabet’s CEO.

Then, in December 2019, Brin and Page shocked the world: They announced in a joint statement that they were stepping down from their respective roles at Alphabet.

Since leaving, Brin has stayed busy with exercising, philanthropy, and an airship startup.

“We’ve never been ones to hold on to management roles when we think there’s a better way to run the company,” they wrote. Both Page and Brin remain members of Alphabet’s board of directors.

Brin’s life outside Alphabet

At the beginning of 2023, reports emerged that Alphabet tapped Brin and Page to help Google compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT in the race to dominate the artificial intelligence space.

By the end of the year, Google confirmed that Brin was a key factor in bringing its AI model Gemini to fruition. In the white paper explaining Gemini’s capabilities, Brin is listed as a “core contributor.”

When he spoke at San Francisco’s AGI House in March 2024, Brin said he “kind of came out of retirement just because the trajectory of AI is so exciting.”

He also addressed criticism of Gemini by defending the text generation feature but conceding that Google “definitely messed up on the image generation.”

During a talk at the “All-In” podcast summit in Los Angeles in September 2024, Brin said he’s back working at Google “pretty much every day.”

“As a computer scientist, I’ve never seen anything as exciting as all of the AI progress that’s happened the last few years,” he said.

Brin said he’s even writing “a little bit of code,” but he’s mostly using Google’s AI tools to help with programming — something he feels Google engineers should do more.

“I really got back into the technical work because I just don’t want to miss out on this,” Brin said.