Sergey Mikhaylovich Brin is a Russian-American mathematician and computer scientist who co-founded Google along with Larry Page and has an estimated net worth of $97.25 billion as of April 2021. He is the eighth wealthiest person in the world, according to Bloomberg, and the ninth according to Forbes. In December 2019, Brin resigned as President of Alphabet, the parent company of Google since 2015, but remains a board member and a controller shareholder with 25.2% of the total voting power. He owns 19.1 million Class A shares and 19.1 Class B shares of the company, equal to more than $86 billion, considering the closing price of the stock on April 12, 2021.

In late 2020, Brin established a family office in Singapore to manage his assets. Setting up this firm, named Bayshore Global Management, he joins the group of billionaires that take advantage of Singapore's low tax regime and incentives program for this kind of company.

Brin was born on August 21, 1973, in Moscow, Russia. He fled the Soviet Union with his family at the age of 6 and grew up in Adelphi, Maryland. Brin studied mathematics and computer science at the University of Maryland. After receiving a fellowship from the National Science Foundation, he pursued a doctorate at Stanford University and wrote several papers on data mining and pattern extraction for leading academic journals. At Stanford, Brin met his future partner Larry Page.

In that time, existing developments could only rank search results by the frequency of appearance of a given word on a web page. Page thought that ranking websites by the number of links leading to it was a more useful measure of a web page relevance, and to explore the possibilities of his idea he appealed to the data mining expertise of his classmate Brin. Together, Page and Brin authored the paper The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, which quickly became one of the most downloaded scientific documents in history.

They registered the domain google.com in 1997, and the following year incorporated Google as a privately held company. At first, Page served as CEO and Brin as President. After outgrowing some offices, the company moved to a complex of buildings in Mountain View, California, in 1999. In 2000, they started to sell text-based advertisements related to search keywords. By 2001, with the dot com crisis, a significant number of internet companies had folded, but Google was growing and turning a profit. Page and Brin recruited Eric Schmidt to serve as CEO, with Page taking the role of President for Products and Brin as President for Technology.

Google’s initial public offering in 2004 gave the company a market capitalization of $23 billion, and employees owning shares became millionaires overnight. Page and Brin, who became multibillionaires at age 27, reduced their salaries to a dollar a year and refused bonuses, tying their wealth to the performance of the company in the stock market.

Despite its growth, Google has succeeded in preserving an informal and creative work environment where employees are encouraged to spend 20 percent of their work time on independent projects. In addition to its product development, Google has also grown through acquisitions of hardware and software companies, among which stand out YouTube, acquired for $1.65 billion in 2006. Prior to the purchase, YouTube’s earnings were negligible, but with Google that changed significantly. Today 99% of Google’s revenue is derived from advertising.

Brin has invested in the founding rounds of electric vehicles developer Tesla with $40 million in 2006, DNA testing technology company 23andMe with $13.6 million in 2009 and $50 million in 2012, and Parkinson’s curative treatments developer OccamzRazor with $650,000 in 2018. Besides, he is financing the building of a flying airship at a NASA research center that costs between $100 and $150 million and is funded entirely by him.

Brin owns a 3,457-square-foot, two-story, three-bedroom penthouse in Manhattan bought for $8.5 million in 2008, an estate in Los Altos Hills, California, valued at $7 in 2014, and in 2015 was rumored that he was interested in a 30,000-square-foot mansion in Alpine, New Jersey, valued at $48.88 million. He also owns a yacht purchased for $80 million in 2011.

Brin pays 47 people who work for him and his family, including ex-bankers who manage his philanthropy and finances. He is one of the most philanthropic billionaires in the world: from 2000 to 2017 donated $37.5 billion.

Brin is married to Nicole Shanahan since 2018. They have been dating since 2015, and have one child. He also has two children with his former wife Anne Wojcicki, co-founder and CEO of the $1.5 billion genetics company 23andMe.

Sources: Bloomberg, Forbes, SEC, SEC (2), BBC, Achievement.org, Crunchbase, Business Insider, Vanity Fair, Business Insider (2).

This article was updated on April 12, 2021 by Andrés Taurian

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