Sergey Brin
Based on Wikipedia: Sergey Brin
The Boy Who Escaped an Empire and Built One
In May 1979, a five-year-old boy named Sergey Brin left Moscow with his family, carrying little more than the clothes on their backs and a burning desire to escape a country that had made their lives impossible. They had waited eight months in a state of anxious limbo—his father fired from his job, his mother forced to quit hers—all because they had dared to apply for permission to leave the Soviet Union.
That boy would grow up to create something that would fundamentally change how humanity accesses information. Not since Johannes Gutenberg introduced the mechanical printing press to Europe in 1440 has any invention so profoundly transformed our relationship with knowledge.
This is the story of Sergey Brin.
A Family of Mathematicians
Sergey Mikhailovich Brin was born on August 21, 1973, in Moscow, when Russia was still part of the Soviet Union. Mathematics ran in his blood. Both of his parents, Mikhail and Eugenia Brin, had graduated from Moscow State University—one of the most prestigious institutions in the Soviet bloc. His father would eventually become a mathematics professor, and his mother a researcher at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) Goddard Space Flight Center.
The family lived in a cramped three-room apartment in central Moscow, shared with Sergey's paternal grandmother. It was a typical Soviet arrangement, where multiple generations crowded together because housing was scarce and allocated by the state rather than chosen by citizens.
But something happened in 1977 that would alter the trajectory of the entire family. Mikhail Brin attended a mathematics conference in Warsaw, Poland. For Soviet citizens, any glimpse of life outside the iron curtain was revelatory. When he returned, he made an announcement to his family: it was time to leave.
The Long Wait
The decision to emigrate from the Soviet Union was not like deciding to move from one country to another today. It was a one-way ticket into uncertainty, a leap into the unknown that could easily end in disaster.
Jews in the Soviet Union faced systematic discrimination—what was euphemistically called "anti-Semitism" but manifested in blocked career paths, denied educational opportunities, and a pervasive sense of being unwelcome in one's own country. The Brins were Jewish, and Mikhail had seen enough.
In September 1978, the family formally applied for an exit visa. The response was swift and brutal: Mikhail was "promptly fired" from his position. Eugenia had to leave her job as well. This was standard practice. The Soviet state viewed emigration as betrayal, and those who sought to leave were often punished with unemployment, harassment, and sometimes imprisonment.
For the next eight months, the Brins lived in limbo. They had no steady income, surviving on temporary jobs while waiting for a decision that might never come. Many Soviet Jews who applied to emigrate became what were called "refuseniks"—people whose applications were denied, leaving them trapped in a country that had marked them as traitors but wouldn't let them go.
The Brins were lucky. In May 1979, their exit visas were approved.
Journey to America
The path from Moscow to the United States wasn't direct. The family first lived in Vienna, then Paris, while Mikhail worked to secure a teaching position in America. An organization called the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society—commonly known by its acronym HIAS, which has helped refugees resettle since 1881—provided crucial support during this transition.
On October 25, 1979, six-year-old Sergey Brin set foot in the United States for the first time.
Years later, he would donate one million dollars to HIAS. He remembered what they had done for his family.
The Making of a Prodigy
Sergey attended Eleanor Roosevelt High School in Maryland, named after the former First Lady known for her advocacy of civil rights and human dignity. He then followed the family tradition of mathematical excellence, enrolling at the University of Maryland in September 1990.
He was seventeen years old.
By nineteen, he had completed his Bachelor of Science degree with honors in computer science and high honors in mathematics. The distinction between "honors" and "high honors" matters—it meant he hadn't just excelled in one field but had demonstrated exceptional ability across both.
During his undergraduate years, Brin interned at Wolfram Research, the company that created Mathematica. This wasn't some generic software company—Mathematica was (and remains) one of the most sophisticated computational tools ever created, used by scientists, engineers, and mathematicians worldwide to solve problems that would be impossible to tackle by hand.
After graduation in 1993, Brin headed west to Stanford University on a prestigious graduate fellowship from the National Science Foundation (NSF). Stanford's computer science program was among the best in the world, a hothouse of innovation nestled in what was rapidly becoming known as Silicon Valley.
The Meeting
Stanford had an orientation program for new graduate students. It was at one of these events that Sergey Brin met a fellow PhD student named Larry Page.
They did not immediately become friends. In fact, they seemed to disagree about almost everything. Both were opinionated, both were brilliant, and both were convinced they were right.
But something clicked. After spending time together, they became what observers described as "intellectual soul-mates and close friends." This is a pattern that repeats throughout the history of transformative partnerships—initial friction giving way to deep collaboration. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Watson and Crick.
Brin's research focus was on data mining—the process of extracting useful patterns from large datasets. Page was interested in something different: how to measure the importance of academic papers by analyzing their citations. If many other papers cited a particular work, that suggested the work was significant.
These two interests would fuse into something revolutionary.
The Birth of an Idea
Page had created a project called BackRub. The name referred to "backlinks"—the links that point to a webpage from other webpages. His insight was profound: just as academic papers gain credibility when other papers cite them, webpages gain importance when other webpages link to them.
But how do you turn that insight into mathematics?
This is where Brin's expertise became essential. Together, they developed something called the PageRank algorithm. The name was a pun—it ranked pages, and it was named after Larry Page. The algorithm didn't just count how many links pointed to a page; it weighted those links by the importance of the pages they came from. A link from a highly-ranked page was worth more than a link from an obscure one.
This created a recursive problem—you need to know page rankings to calculate page rankings—but mathematics has tools for handling such situations. The algorithm would iterate, refining its estimates until they stabilized.
The result was a search engine that could find relevant information far more effectively than anything that existed at the time.
The Garage
The early days of Google were chaos in the best possible way.
Brin and Page first set up their equipment in Page's dormitory room. When that filled up, they converted Brin's dorm room into an office and programming center. They scrounged spare parts from inexpensive computers—this was the era before cloud computing, when you needed physical hardware to do anything at scale.
Their project grew so rapidly that it started causing problems for Stanford's computing infrastructure. The university's network wasn't designed to handle this kind of load.
In August 1996, the initial version of Google went live on Stanford's website. By early 1997, they had a working search engine that users could query. By mid-1998, they were handling 10,000 searches per day.
That was the moment of realization. As Page later recalled: "We figured, maybe this is really real."
In 1998, Brin suspended his PhD studies. The company moved into a garage in Menlo Park, California—a garage belonging to Susan Wojcicki, who would later become Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of YouTube. The mythology of Silicon Valley is filled with garages: Hewlett-Packard started in a garage, Apple started in a garage. There's something fitting about billion-dollar companies beginning in spaces designed for cars.
The Gutenberg Comparison
When people try to explain the significance of what Brin and Page created, they reach for the most transformative communication technology in human history: the printing press.
In 1440, Johannes Gutenberg introduced mechanical printing to Europe. Before Gutenberg, books were copied by hand—a laborious process that made them rare and expensive. The average person had no access to written knowledge. After Gutenberg, books could be mass-produced. Ideas could spread. The Renaissance flourished.
Google, the argument goes, did something similar for the internet age. Information existed online, but finding it was nearly impossible. Search engines before Google were primitive—they matched keywords without understanding relevance, returning pages of useless results. Google made the internet's knowledge accessible to ordinary people.
The authors of a book about the company put it bluntly: "Not since Gutenberg has any new invention empowered individuals, and transformed access to information, as profoundly as Google."
Whether this comparison is hyperbole or understatement remains to be seen. We're still living through the transformation.
Beyond Search
Even in those early days, Brin and Page were thinking beyond web search. They began contemplating "information that was at the time beyond the web"—things like digitizing books and expanding access to health information.
Google Books, Google Scholar, Google Health—these weren't afterthoughts. They were implicit in the original vision: to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible.
This ambition would eventually lead to Alphabet Inc., the parent company created in 2015 to house Google and its various "moonshot" projects. Brin served as president of Alphabet until December 3, 2019, when he stepped down from day-to-day operations. He and Page remained as co-founders, controlling shareholders, and board members.
Then, in December 2023, something interesting happened. Brin came out of retirement.
The reason? Artificial intelligence.
The AI Return
The explosion of AI capabilities in the early 2020s—particularly large language models like ChatGPT—represented both an opportunity and an existential threat to Google. The company had pioneered much of the underlying technology, including the "transformer" architecture that powers modern AI. But competitors were moving fast.
Brin returned to contribute to AI research at Alphabet. The details of his involvement remain largely private, but his return signaled how seriously the company was taking the AI race.
The Immigrant's Fortune
As of September 2024, Sergey Brin's estimated net worth was $135 billion, making him the tenth-richest person in the world according to Bloomberg. He is what's called a "centibillionaire"—someone whose wealth exceeds one hundred billion dollars.
This is an almost incomprehensible amount of money. If you spent one million dollars every single day, it would take you over 369 years to spend $135 billion.
The boy who left Moscow with nothing now owns a superyacht called Dragonfly. He and Page jointly own a customized Boeing 767-200 and a Dassault/Dornier Alpha Jet. These aircraft are housed at Moffett Federal Airfield, a NASA facility in California's Silicon Valley, at a cost of $1.3 million per year. The Boeing has been outfitted with scientific equipment by NASA to allow experimental data collection during flights.
Brin has also backed an airship company called LTA Research & Exploration. In October 2023, the company's flagship craft—the Pathfinder 1, stretching 124 meters long—became the largest airship since the Hindenburg to receive clearance for flight testing. The Hindenburg, of course, was the German passenger airship that famously caught fire and crashed in 1937, effectively ending the era of rigid airships. Brin seems interested in reviving the technology.
The Personal Cost of Fame
Brin was raised Jewish but is not religious. His personal life has been turbulent.
In May 2007, he married Anne Wojcicki—the sister of Susan Wojcicki, in whose garage Google was born. Anne was a biotech analyst and entrepreneur who would go on to found 23andMe, the genetic testing company. They had two children together, a son born in 2008 and a daughter in 2011.
In August 2013, it was announced that they were living separately. Reports indicated that Brin had an extramarital affair with a colleague who worked on Google Glass, the company's augmented reality headset project. The divorce was finalized in June 2015.
Brin married again in November 2018, this time to Nicole Shanahan, a legal technology founder. They had a daughter together later that year. But this marriage also ended—they separated in December 2021, and Brin filed for divorce in January 2022. The Wall Street Journal reported that a factor in the breakup was an affair between Shanahan and Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX.
Wealth and fame, it seems, do not guarantee happiness.
The Parkinson's Shadow
Sergey Brin's mother, Eugenia, was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. This degenerative disorder affects the nervous system, causing tremors, stiffness, and difficulty with movement and coordination. There is currently no cure.
In 2008, Brin made a donation to the University of Maryland School of Medicine, where his mother had received treatment. But that was just the beginning. According to Forbes, he has donated over one billion dollars to fund research on the disease.
This is philanthropy at a scale that can actually move the needle on scientific research. For context, the entire budget of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke—the branch of the National Institutes of Health that funds Parkinson's research—is around $2.5 billion per year. A billion dollars from a single donor is significant.
Brin has also supported The Michael J. Fox Foundation, established by the actor who publicly disclosed his Parkinson's diagnosis and became one of the most visible advocates for research into the disease.
Politics and Recognition
Brin has donated to Democratic Party candidates and organizations, including $5,000 to Barack Obama's 2012 reelection campaign and $30,800 to the Democratic National Committee (DNC). However, in January 2025, he attended the second inauguration of Donald Trump, sitting alongside Trump supporters and other technology executives.
This kind of political flexibility—or perhaps pragmatism—is increasingly common among tech billionaires, who must work with whichever administration holds power regardless of personal political preferences.
The accolades Brin has received over the years are numerous. In 2002, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT) Technology Review named him one of the top 100 innovators in the world under age 35. In 2003, he and Page received an honorary Master of Business Administration (MBA) from IE Business School. In 2004, they were awarded the Marconi Prize, given for significant contributions to communications technology—named after Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor of radio.
In 2006, Brin was among the inaugural winners of the Great Immigrants Award, given by Carnegie Corporation of New York. The irony was not lost on anyone. The Soviet refugee who arrived in America at age six had created one of the most valuable companies in history.
In 2009, Forbes named Brin and Page the fifth most powerful people in the world. That same year, Brin was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering—one of the highest professional distinctions an engineer can receive.
The Meaning of It All
What does the story of Sergey Brin tell us?
One lesson is about immigration. The United States gained one of its most successful entrepreneurs because a Jewish family was allowed to leave the Soviet Union and welcomed to American shores. HIAS helped them resettle. The University of Maryland educated both Mikhail and Sergey. Stanford provided the environment where Google was born.
Another lesson is about collaboration. Brin was brilliant, but Google didn't emerge from his mind alone. It required the partnership with Larry Page, two different intellectual orientations combining to create something neither could have achieved separately.
A third lesson is about persistence. The PageRank algorithm worked because Brin and Page kept iterating, kept refining, kept pushing through the problems. They scrounged computer parts and crashed university networks. They dropped out of PhD programs to work out of a garage.
But perhaps the deepest lesson is about the unpredictability of human potential. In 1979, no one looking at a six-year-old refugee from Moscow could have predicted what he would become. The conditions that allow human flourishing are mysterious. Remove any link in the chain—the exit visa, HIAS, Maryland, Stanford, Larry Page—and the story might have been entirely different.
We don't know how many potential Sergey Brins are out there, their talents unrealized because circumstances didn't align. What we do know is that when immigration works, when education works, when brilliant people find each other and collaborate, the results can reshape the world.
That reshaping continues. Brin came out of retirement because artificial intelligence might be even more transformative than search engines. At fifty years old, the boy from Moscow is still trying to change how humanity relates to information.
The story isn't over.