Sergey Brin

• 1. Introduction

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  Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, helped build a search tool that grew faster than its makers expected. His partner Larry Page later recalled the moment the project began to feel real: "Pretty soon, we had 10,000 searches a day. And we figured, maybe this is really real." That remark came from a pair of graduate students with a pile of borrowed computer parts. It did not come from a company with an office. Brin's path to that moment began far from California, in the Soviet capital. Where did he come from, and what did his family risk to leave? How did two students build something that people compared to the printing press? And what does a person do after a success on that scale?

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• 2. Leaving Moscow

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  In 1977, Mikhail Brin came home from a mathematics conference in Warsaw, Poland, with an announcement for his family. Because of antisemitism in the Soviet Union, he said, it was time to emigrate. His son Sergey had been born in Moscow on the 21st of August 1973. The household lived in a three-room apartment in central Moscow, and Sergey's paternal grandmother lived there too.

  In September 1978, the family formally applied for exit visas. The consequences arrived quickly. Mikhail was "promptly fired", and Sergey's mother had to give up her own job for related reasons. For the next eight months they had no steady income and took temporary work. Many applicants, known as refuseniks, had been turned down. The Brins feared they would be refused as well.

  The answer changed in May 1979, when the visas were granted and the family was allowed to leave. Their route ran through Vienna and Paris. Mikhail meanwhile secured a teaching position at the University of Maryland, with help from Anatole Katok. Along the way, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society supported the family. They arrived in the United States on the 25th of October 1979. A job at the University of Maryland was waiting for the father, and a new country was waiting for a six-year-old.

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• 3. A Family of Mathematicians

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  Mikhail and Eugenia Brin had both graduated from Moscow State University. In Maryland, Mikhail became a mathematics professor, and he is now retired. Eugenia worked as a researcher at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Their son grew up inside that world of numbers and laboratories.

  Sergey attended Eleanor Roosevelt High School. In September 1990 he enrolled at the University of Maryland. There he studied mathematics alongside computer science, following the same subject that his father and grandfather had studied. He graduated in 1993 at the age of 19, with honors in computer science and high honors in mathematics.

  That same year, he interned at Wolfram Research, the company behind Mathematica. Then he moved west to Stanford University to pursue a PhD in computer science. A graduate fellowship from the National Science Foundation supported his studies, and he earned a master's degree in computer science in 1995.

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• 4. Backrub and PageRank

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  At an orientation for new Stanford students, Brin met Larry Page. The two seemed to disagree about almost everything. After they spent time together, though, they "became intellectual soul-mates and close friends." Brin's interest was in building data mining systems. Page was exploring how a research paper's importance could be judged by the other papers that cited it. Together they wrote a paper titled "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine."

  Their web crawler, part of a project called Backrub, gathered data on which pages linked to which. To turn those links into a measure of importance, Brin and Page developed the PageRank algorithm. It weighed both the number of links pointing at a page and the rank of the pages doing the linking. They realized the method could drive a search engine far better than anything then available.

  The hardware was improvised. Page's dormitory room became a machine laboratory, where spare parts pulled from inexpensive computers formed a device linking the engine to Stanford's broadband campus network. Brin's dorm room became an office and programming center. As the project grew, it strained Stanford's computing infrastructure. Because they had no web developer, Page used his basic HTML skills to make a plain search page. In August 1996, the first version of Google went live on the Stanford website.

  A Backrub page dated the 29th of August 1996 listed some rough statistics. It counted 75.2306 million indexable HTML URLs and 207.022 gigabytes of downloaded content. The system was written in Java and Python. It ran on several Sun Ultras and Intel Pentiums running Linux, and its main database sat on a Sun Ultra series II with 28 gigabytes of disk. Page thanked Scott Hassan and Alan Steremberg for talented implementation help. He added that Sergey Brin had been very involved and deserved many thanks.

  Page described what the early system could do: "We realized that we had a querying tool. It gave you a good overall ranking of pages and ordering of follow-up pages." The program's popularity at Stanford led Brin to discontinue his doctoral work and start Google in Susan Wojcicki's garage in Menlo Park, California. As of 2008, he was still on leave from the PhD.

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• 5. The Gutenberg Comparison

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  In 1440, Johannes Gutenberg introduced the mechanical printing press to Europe and used it to print Bibles for mass consumption. Books and manuscripts that had been copied by hand could suddenly be produced much faster. Knowledge spread, and the European Renaissance gained momentum. Some commentators argued that Google had done a similar job for a new era.

  The authors of The Google Story made the same comparison. They wrote: "Not since Gutenberg... has any new invention empowered individuals, and transformed access to information, as profoundly as Google."

  The founders' ambitions did not stop at web pages. Not long after cooking up their search engine, Brin and Page began thinking about information that lay beyond the web at that time. Their examples included digitizing books and expanding health information.

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• 6. Honors and Power

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  In 2002, MIT Technology Review placed Brin and Page on its TR100 list of the top 100 innovators in the world under the age of 35. In 2003, IE Business School awarded both men an honorary MBA. The school said they embodied the entrepreneurial spirit and lent momentum to new businesses. The same year, they were award recipients and national finalists for the EY Entrepreneur of the Year Award.

  The Marconi Prize came in 2004, along with election as Fellows of the Marconi Foundation. The citation praised "the invention that has fundamentally changed the way information is retrieved today." That year Brin also received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement at a ceremony in Chicago, Illinois. In 2006, he was in the inaugural class of winners of the Great Immigrants Award from Carnegie Corporation of New York.

  In February 2009, the National Academy of Engineering inducted Brin. It selected him for leadership in developing rapid indexing and retrieval of relevant information from the World Wide Web. In November 2009, Forbes named Brin and Page the fifth most powerful people in the world. Google itself collected prizes early, including a Technical Excellence Award from PC Magazine in 1999 and a Webby Award in 2000. In 2013, Brin even appeared as himself in a cameo in the film The Internship.

  Brin served as president of Google's parent company, Alphabet Inc., until he stepped down in 2019. He and Page stayed on as co-founders, controlling shareholders and board members. In 2023, Brin came out of retirement to contribute to AI research at Alphabet. As of September 2024, Bloomberg ranked him the tenth-richest person in the world, with an estimated net worth of $135 billion.

  Politics has followed the money. Brin gave $5,000 to Barack Obama's 2012 reelection campaign and $30,800 to the DNC. He later attended the second inauguration of Donald Trump, sitting alongside Trump supporters and other tech moguls. In December 2025, Brin and Page, worth a combined $520 billion, terminated or moved out of California sixty limited liability companies that hold their assets. In 2026, President Trump appointed Brin to the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.

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• 7. Airships and Side Bets

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  In June 2008, Brin invested $4.5 million in Space Adventures, a Virginia-based space tourism company. His other spending stayed closer to the ground, though not always on it. He and Page jointly own a customized Boeing 767-200 and a Dassault/Dornier Alpha Jet. They pay $1.3 million a year to keep those aircraft at Moffett Federal Airfield, alongside two Gulfstream V jets owned by Google executives. NASA installed scientific equipment on the aircraft so that experimental data can be collected in flight.

  Brin also backs LTA Research & Exploration LLC, an airship maker. In October 2023, its 124-meter flagship, Pathfinder 1, became the largest airship since the Hindenburg to receive clearance for flight testing. The permission covered the airspace over Moffett Field and neighboring Palo Alto Airport, up to a height of 460 meters.

  On the water, Brin owns the superyacht Dragonfly. He has also spoken openly about his experiences with psychedelic drugs such as psilocybin. His investments follow that interest. One of them is Soneira Bio, which is developing the compound ibogaine, under the designation SON-001, for potential medical use.

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• 8. Family and Giving

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  In May 2007, Brin married biotech analyst and entrepreneur Anne Wojcicki in the Bahamas. A son was born in late 2008 and a daughter in late 2011. In August 2013 it was announced that the couple were living separately, and in June 2015 their divorce was finalized.

  On the 7th of November 2018, Brin married Nicole Shanahan, a legal tech founder. Their daughter was born in late 2018. The couple separated on the 15th of December 2021, and Brin filed for divorce on the 4th of January 2022. The divorce was finalized in the summer of 2023. Brin was raised Jewish but is not religious.

  His mother, Eugenia, who lived from 1948 to 2024, was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. In 2008, Brin decided to make a donation to the University of Maryland School of Medicine, where she has received treatment. According to Forbes, he has since donated over $1 billion to fund research on the disease. The Michael J. Fox Foundation has been among the recipients of his giving.

  Brin and Wojcicki ran The Brin Wojcicki Foundation together until 2014. Since then, Brin has given through the Sergey Brin Family Foundation and a donor-advised fund. In 2009, he and Wojcicki gave $1 million to the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, the same organization that had helped his family after they left Moscow.

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