Sergey Brin
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Sergey Mikhailovich Brin (; born August 21, 1973) is an American computer scientist and businessman who co-founded
Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...
with
Larry Page Lawrence Edward Page (born March 26, 1973) is an American businessman, computer engineer and computer scientist best known for co-founding Google with Sergey Brin. Page was chief executive officer of Google from 1997 until August 2001 when ...
. He was the president of Google's parent company,
Alphabet Inc. Alphabet Inc. is an American multinational technology conglomerate holding company headquartered in Mountain View, California. Alphabet is the world's third-largest technology company by revenue, after Amazon and Apple, the largest techno ...
, until stepping down from the role on December 3, 2019. He and Page remain at Alphabet as co-founders, controlling shareholders and board members. As of June 2025, Brin is the tenth richest person in the world, with an estimated net worth of $149 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index and 141.5 billion, according to
Forbes ''Forbes'' () is an American business magazine founded by B. C. Forbes in 1917. It has been owned by the Hong Kong–based investment group Integrated Whale Media Investments since 2014. Its chairman and editor-in-chief is Steve Forbes. The co ...
, making him the eighth-richest person in the world. Brin immigrated to the United States from the
Soviet Union The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...
at the age of six. He earned his bachelor's degree at the
University of Maryland, College Park The University of Maryland, College Park (University of Maryland, UMD, or simply Maryland) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in College Park, Maryland, United States. Founded in 1856, UMD i ...
, following in his father's and grandfather's footsteps by studying mathematics as well as computer science. After graduation, in September 1993, he enrolled in
Stanford University Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...
to acquire a PhD in computer science. There he met Page, with whom he built a
web search engine A search engine is a software system that provides hyperlinks to web pages, and other relevant information on World Wide Web, the Web in response to a user's web query, query. The user enters a query in a web browser or a mobile app, and the sea ...
. The program became popular at Stanford, and he discontinued his PhD studies to start Google in Susan Wojcicki's garage in Menlo Park. In December 2023, he came out of retirement to lead
Alphabet Inc. Alphabet Inc. is an American multinational technology conglomerate holding company headquartered in Mountain View, California. Alphabet is the world's third-largest technology company by revenue, after Amazon and Apple, the largest techno ...
into the new era of
Artificial General Intelligence Artificial general intelligence (AGI)—sometimes called human‑level intelligence AI—is a type of artificial intelligence that would match or surpass human capabilities across virtually all cognitive tasks. Some researchers argue that sta ...
, after the launch of
ChatGPT ChatGPT is a generative artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI and released on November 30, 2022. It uses large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4o as well as other Multimodal learning, multimodal models to create human-like re ...
.


Early life and education

Sergey Mikhailovich Brin was born on August 21, 1973, in Moscow in the
Soviet Union The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...
, to Russian Jewish parents, Mikhail and Eugenia Brin (1948–2024), both graduates of
Moscow State University Moscow State University (MSU), officially M. V. Lomonosov Moscow State University,. is a public university, public research university in Moscow, Russia. The university includes 15 research institutes, 43 faculties, more than 300 departments, a ...
(MSU). His father is a retired mathematics professor at the
University of Maryland The University of Maryland, College Park (University of Maryland, UMD, or simply Maryland) is a public land-grant research university in College Park, Maryland, United States. Founded in 1856, UMD is the flagship institution of the Univ ...
, and his mother was a researcher at
NASA The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agencies of the United States government, independent agency of the federal government of the United States, US federal government responsible for the United States ...
's
Goddard Space Flight Center The Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) is a major NASA space research laboratory located approximately northeast of Washington, D.C., in Greenbelt, Maryland, United States. Established on May 1, 1959, as NASA's first space flight center, GSFC ...
. The Brin family lived in a three-room apartment in central Moscow, which they also shared with Sergey's paternal grandmother. In 1977, after his father returned from a mathematics conference in Warsaw, Poland, Mikhail Brin announced that it was time for the family to emigrate. They formally applied for their exit visa in September 1978, and as a result, his father was "promptly fired". For related reasons, his mother had to leave her job. For the next eight months, without any steady income, they were forced to take on temporary jobs as they waited, afraid their request would be denied as it was for many refuseniks. In May 1979, they were granted their official exit visas and were allowed to leave the country. The Brin family lived in Vienna and Paris while Mikhail Brin secured a teaching position at the University of Maryland with help from Anatole Katok. During this time, the Brin family received support and assistance from the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. They arrived in the United States on October 25, 1979. Brin attended elementary school at Paint Branch Montessori School in Adelphi, Maryland, but he received further education at home; his father, a professor in the department of mathematics at the University of Maryland, encouraged him to learn mathematics and his family helped him retain his Russian-language skills. He attended Eleanor Roosevelt High School. In September 1990, Brin enrolled in the University of Maryland, where he received his Bachelor of Science from the Department of Computer Science in 1993 with honors in computer science and mathematics at the age of 19. In 1993, he interned at
Wolfram Research Wolfram Research, Inc. ( ) is an American Multinational corporation, multinational company that creates computational technology. Wolfram's flagship product is the technical computing program Wolfram Mathematica, first released on June 23, 1988. ...
, the developers of
Mathematica Wolfram (previously known as Mathematica and Wolfram Mathematica) is a software system with built-in libraries for several areas of technical computing that allows machine learning, statistics, symbolic computation, data manipulation, network ...
. Brin began his graduate study in computer science at
Stanford University Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...
on a graduate fellowship from the National Science Foundation, receiving an M.S. in computer science in 1995. , he was on leave from his PhD studies at Stanford.


Search engine development

During an orientation for new students at Stanford, he met
Larry Page Lawrence Edward Page (born March 26, 1973) is an American businessman, computer engineer and computer scientist best known for co-founding Google with Sergey Brin. Page was chief executive officer of Google from 1997 until August 2001 when ...
. The two men seemed to disagree on most subjects, but after spending time together they "became intellectual soul-mates and close friends." Brin's focus was on developing data mining systems while Page's was on extending "the concept of inferring the importance of a research paper from its
citation A citation is a reference to a source. More precisely, a citation is an abbreviated alphanumeric expression embedded in the body of an intellectual work that denotes an entry in the bibliographic references section of the work for the purpose o ...
s in other papers". Together, they authored a paper titled "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale
Hypertext Hypertext is E-text, text displayed on a computer display or other electronic devices with references (hyperlinks) to other text that the reader can immediately access. Hypertext documents are interconnected by hyperlinks, which are typic ...
ual Web Search Engine". To convert the backlink data gathered by BackRub's
web crawler Web crawler, sometimes called a spider or spiderbot and often shortened to crawler, is an Internet bot that systematically browses the World Wide Web and that is typically operated by search engines for the purpose of Web indexing (''web spider ...
into a measure of importance for a given web page, Brin and Page developed the PageRank algorithm, and realized that it could be used to build a
search engine A search engine is a software system that provides hyperlinks to web pages, and other relevant information on World Wide Web, the Web in response to a user's web query, query. The user enters a query in a web browser or a mobile app, and the sea ...
far superior to those existing at the time. The new algorithm relied on a new kind of technology that analyzed the relevance of the
backlink From the point of view of a given web resource (referent), a backlink is a regular hyperlink on another web resource (the referrer) that points to the referent. A ''web resource'' may be (for example) a website, web page, or web directory. A ba ...
s that connected one Web page to another, and allowed the number of links and their rank, to determine the rank of the page.Moschovitis Group. ''The Internet: A Historical Encyclopedia'', ABC-CLIO, 2005. Combining their ideas, they began utilizing Page's dormitory room as a machine laboratory, and extracted spare parts from inexpensive computers to create a device that they used to connect the nascent search engine with Stanford's broadband campus network. After filling Page's room with equipment, they then converted Brin's dorm room into an office and programming center, where they tested their new search engine designs on the web. The rapid growth of their project caused Stanford's computing infrastructure to experience problems. Page and Brin used Page's basic
HTML Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It defines the content and structure of web content. It is often assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets ( ...
programming skills to set up a simple search page for users, as they did not have a web page developer to create anything visually elaborate. They also began using any computer part they could find to assemble the necessary computing power to handle searches by multiple users. As their search engine grew in popularity among Stanford users, it required additional servers to process the queries. In August 1996, the initial version of Google was made available on the Stanford Web site. By early 1997, the BackRub page described the state as follows: ::Some Rough Statistics (from August 29, 1996) ::Total indexable HTML urls: 75.2306 Million ::Total content downloaded: 207.022 gigabytes ::... ::BackRub is written in Java and Python and runs on several Sun Ultras and Intel Pentiums running
Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...
. The primary database is kept on a Sun Ultra series II with 28GB of disk. Scott Hassan and Alan Steremberg have provided a great deal of very talented implementation help. Sergey Brin has also been very involved and deserves many thanks. :::- Larry Page BackRub already exhibited the rudimentary functions and characteristics of a search engine: a query input was entered and it provided a list of backlinks ranked by importance. Page recalled: "We realized that we had a querying tool. It gave you a good overall ranking of pages and ordering of follow-up pages." Page said that in mid-1998 they finally realized the further potential of their project: "Pretty soon, we had 10,000 searches a day. And we figured, maybe this is really real." Some compared Page and Brin's vision to the impact of
Johannes Gutenberg Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg ( – 3 February 1468) was a German inventor and Artisan, craftsman who invented the movable type, movable-type printing press. Though movable type was already in use in East Asia, Gutenberg's inven ...
, the inventor of modern printing: The comparison was also noted by the authors of ''The Google Story'': "Not since Gutenberg... has any new invention empowered individuals, and transformed access to information, as profoundly as Google." Vise, David, and Malseed, Mark. ''
The Google Story ''The Google Story'' is a book by David Vise and Mark Malseed that takes an in-depth look at the founding of Google and why it is unique among information technology companies. The book discusses the founders, the company, and the culture that Goo ...
'', Delta Publ. (2006)
Also, not long after the two "cooked up their new engine for web searches, they began thinking about information that was at the time beyond the web," such as digitizing books and expanding health information.


Other interests

In June 2008, Brin invested $4.5 million in Space Adventures, a
Virginia Virginia, officially the Commonwealth of Virginia, is a U.S. state, state in the Southeastern United States, Southeastern and Mid-Atlantic (United States), Mid-Atlantic regions of the United States between the East Coast of the United States ...
-based
space tourism Space tourism is human space travel for recreational purposes. There are several different types of space tourism, including orbital, suborbital and lunar space tourism. Tourists are motivated by the possibility of viewing Earth from space, ...
company. Brin and Page jointly own a customized Boeing 767–200 and a Dassault/Dornier Alpha Jet, and pay $1.3 million a year to house them and two
Gulfstream V The Gulfstream V (Model GV, pronounced "G-five") is a large, long-range business jet aircraft produced by Gulfstream Aerospace, derived from the previous Gulfstream IV. It flies up to , up to and has a range. It typically accommodates four c ...
jets owned by Google executives at
Moffett Federal Airfield Moffett Federal Airfield , also known as Moffett Field, is a joint civil-military airport located in an unincorporated part of Santa Clara County, California, United States, between northern Mountain View and northern Sunnyvale. On November ...
. The aircraft has scientific equipment installed by
NASA The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agencies of the United States government, independent agency of the federal government of the United States, US federal government responsible for the United States ...
to allow experimental data to be collected in flight. Brin is a backer of LTA Research & Exploration LLC, an
airship An airship, dirigible balloon or dirigible is a type of aerostat (lighter-than-air) aircraft that can navigate through the air flying powered aircraft, under its own power. Aerostats use buoyancy from a lifting gas that is less dense than the ...
maker company. In October 2023, LTA's 124-meter long flagship, Pathfinder 1, became the largest airship since the '' Hindenburg'' to receive clearance for flight testing, permitted over the boundaries of Moffett Field and neighboring Palo Alto Airport’s airspaces, at a height of up to 460 meters.


Personal life

Brin was raised Jewish, but is not religious. In May 2007, Brin married biotech analyst and entrepreneur
Anne Wojcicki Anne E. Wojcicki ( ; born July 28, 1973) is an American entrepreneur. She is known for co-founding the personal genomics company 23andMe. Early life and education Wojcicki was born in Palo Alto, California, the youngest of three sisters: Susan W ...
in
the Bahamas The Bahamas, officially the Commonwealth of The Bahamas, is an Archipelagic state, archipelagic and island country within the Lucayan Archipelago of the Atlantic Ocean. It contains 97 per cent of the archipelago's land area and 88 per cent of ...
. They had a son in late 2008 and a daughter in late 2011. In August 2013, it was announced that Brin and his wife were living separately after Brin had an extramarital affair with a Google Glass colleague. In June 2015, Brin and Wojcicki finalized their divorce. On November 7, 2018, he married Nicole Shanahan, a legal tech founder. They have a daughter, born in late 2018. Brin and Shanahan separated on December 15, 2021, and Brin filed for divorce on January 4, 2022. In summer 2023, the divorce was finalized. The ''
Wall Street Journal ''The Wall Street Journal'' (''WSJ''), also referred to simply as the ''Journal,'' is an American newspaper based in New York City. The newspaper provides extensive coverage of news, especially business and finance. It operates on a subscriptio ...
'' reported that a reason for the breakup was a "brief affair" in 2021 between Shanahan and
Elon Musk Elon Reeve Musk ( ; born June 28, 1971) is a businessman. He is known for his leadership of Tesla, SpaceX, X (formerly Twitter), and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Musk has been considered the wealthiest person in th ...
. Brin's mother, Eugenia, has been diagnosed with
Parkinson's disease Parkinson's disease (PD), or simply Parkinson's, is a neurodegenerative disease primarily of the central nervous system, affecting both motor system, motor and non-motor systems. Symptoms typically develop gradually and non-motor issues become ...
. In 2008, he decided to make a donation to the
University of Maryland School of Medicine The University of Maryland School of Medicine (abbreviated UMSOM), located in Baltimore City, Maryland, U.S., is the medical school of the University of Maryland, Baltimore and is affiliated with the University of Maryland Medical Center and ...
, where his mother has received treatment. According to ''Forbes'', Brin has donated over $1 billion to fund research on the disease. Brin and Wojcicki, although separated, jointly ran The Brin Wojcicki Foundation until 2014. Since then, Brin has used the Sergey Brin Family Foundation and a donor-advised fund for his philanthropic giving. They donated extensively to The Michael J. Fox Foundation and in 2009 gave $1 million to support the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. Brin is a donor to Democratic Party candidates and organizations, having donated $5,000 to
Barack Obama Barack Hussein Obama II (born August 4, 1961) is an American politician who was the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, he was the first African American president in American history. O ...
's reelection campaign and $30,800 to the DNC. Brin attended the second inauguration of Donald Trump, sitting alongside Donald Trump supporters and other tech moguls.


Awards and accolades


2002–2009

*In 2002, Brin, along with Larry Page, was named in the ''
MIT Technology Review ''MIT Technology Review'' is a bimonthly magazine wholly owned by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It was founded in 1899 as ''The Technology Review'', and was re-launched without "''The''" in its name on April 23, 1998, under then pu ...
'' TR100, as one of the top 100 innovators in the world under the age of 35. *In 2003, both Brin and Page received an honorary MBA from IE Business School "for embodying the entrepreneurial spirit and lending momentum to the creation of new businesses...". *In 2003, Brin and Page were both Award Recipients and National Finalists for the EY Entrepreneur of the Year Award. *In 2004, they received the Marconi Prize, and were elected Fellows of the Marconi Foundation. The two men were "cited for the invention that has fundamentally changed the way information is retrieved today." *In 2004, Brin received the
American Academy of Achievement The American Academy of Achievement, colloquially known as the Academy of Achievement, is a nonprofit educational organization that recognizes some of the highest-achieving people in diverse fields and gives them the opportunity to meet one ano ...
's Golden Plate Award with Larry Page at a ceremony in Chicago, Illinois. *In 2006, Brin was one of the inaugural class of winners of the
Great Immigrants Award The Great Immigrants Award is an annual initiative by the Carnegie Corporation of New York to honor naturalized citizens of the United States who have made significant contributions to American society, democracy, and culture. Established in 200 ...
named by
Carnegie Corporation of New York The Carnegie Corporation of New York is a philanthropic fund established by Andrew Carnegie in 1911 to support education programs across the United States, and later the world. Since its founding, the Carnegie Corporation has endowed or othe ...
.


2009–present

*In November 2009, ''
Forbes ''Forbes'' () is an American business magazine founded by B. C. Forbes in 1917. It has been owned by the Hong Kong–based investment group Integrated Whale Media Investments since 2014. Its chairman and editor-in-chief is Steve Forbes. The co ...
'' named Brin and Page the fifth most powerful people in the world. *Earlier that same year, in February, Brin was inducted into the
National Academy of Engineering The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) is an American Nonprofit organization, nonprofit, NGO, non-governmental organization. It is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), along with the National Academ ...
, which is "among the highest professional distinctions accorded to an engineer ... ndhonors those who have made outstanding contributions to engineering research, practice...". He was selected specifically, "for leadership in development of rapid indexing and retrieval of relevant information from the World Wide Web". *In their "Profiles" of Fellows, the
National Science Foundation The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) is an Independent agencies of the United States government#Examples of independent agencies, independent agency of the Federal government of the United States, United States federal government that su ...
included a number of earlier awards: *As of September 2024, Brin is the tenth-richest person in the world according to Bloomberg, with an estimated net worth of $135 billion.


Appearances in film


References


External links


Sergey Brin
on
Forbes ''Forbes'' () is an American business magazine founded by B. C. Forbes in 1917. It has been owned by the Hong Kong–based investment group Integrated Whale Media Investments since 2014. Its chairman and editor-in-chief is Steve Forbes. The co ...
* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Brin, Sergey 1973 births Living people 21st-century American inventors 21st-century American Jews 21st-century American philanthropists Alphabet Inc. people American billionaires American computer businesspeople American computer programmers American computer scientists American information technology businesspeople American people of Russian-Jewish descent American technology chief executives American technology company founders Business duos Businesspeople from Maryland Businesspeople from the San Francisco Bay Area Businesspeople in software Directors of Alphabet Inc. Google employees Internet pioneers Jewish American scientists Life extensionists Members of the United States National Academy of Engineering Naturalized citizens of the United States People from Adelphi, Maryland People from Greenbelt, Maryland Soviet emigrants to the United States Soviet Jews Stanford University School of Engineering alumni University of Maryland, College Park alumni Web developers Wojcicki family World Economic Forum Young Global Leaders