Sergey Brin

Sergey Mikhailovich Brin arrived in the United States as a six-year-old refugee, co-founded Google in his twenties, spent years running its most ambitious experiments, and then — after stepping back from the company — returned in his fifties to write code for its artificial intelligence.

Leaving Moscow

He was born on 21 August 1973 in Moscow, in the Soviet Union, to a Jewish family. His father, Michael Brin, was a mathematician; his mother, Eugenia, a scientist. Both faced discrimination in Soviet academic life. His father had hoped to become an astronomer, but Jews were effectively barred from the physics departments that led to that career.

In 1979, when Sergey was six, the family emigrated to the United States, with help from a Jewish refugee organisation. They settled in Maryland. Michael Brin became a professor of mathematics at the University of Maryland, and Eugenia worked as a researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

Sergey went to a Montessori school, which he later credited with teaching him to think independently, and was a strong mathematics student from an early age.

Maryland and Stanford

He took a degree in mathematics and computer science at the University of Maryland in 1993, finishing in three years. He won a National Science Foundation fellowship for graduate study and went to Stanford University.

In 1995 he was one of the students assigned to show new arrivals around the campus. One of them was Larry Page. They disagreed about almost everything on the tour and, soon afterwards, began working together on Page’s research project on the links between web pages.

Google

Brin brought the data-mining expertise that helped turn Page’s idea into a working search engine. Together they built PageRank, which ranked web pages by the number and importance of the links pointing to them, and a search engine they eventually called Google.

In 1998 they left their doctoral studies unfinished to found the company. Brin became president of technology. He was the more outgoing of the two founders, and shaped much of Google’s early culture, from its playful office design to its informal motto, “Don’t be evil”. He also argued, unusually for an executive, against Google’s compromises with censorship in China, where the company withdrew its search engine in 2010.

Google went public in 2004, with a structure that gave Brin and Page lasting control through shares with extra votes. The full story of the search engine’s invention is told in the companion profile of Larry Page.

Moonshots

From about 2010 Brin ran Google X, the company’s lab for ambitious long-shot projects. It worked on self-driving cars, which became Waymo; delivery drones; and internet balloons. Its best-known product was Google Glass, a pair of glasses with a small display, which Brin introduced at Google’s 2012 developer conference with a live stunt in which skydivers wearing the glasses jumped onto the building. Glass raised privacy worries and never became a mass-market product.

When Page created Alphabet in 2015, Brin became its president. In December 2019 both founders stepped back from their executive roles, though they remained on the board and in control of a majority of the votes.

Parkinson’s

His mother was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. In 2008 Brin revealed that genetic testing had shown he carried a mutation in the LRRK2 gene, which substantially raises the risk of developing it. He responded as an engineer might, by funding research on a very large scale. He has given more than a billion dollars towards Parkinson’s research, including through the Michael J. Fox Foundation and his own programmes.

He has also backed an airship company, LTA Research, which builds large, modern airships intended in part for disaster relief.

Family

In 2007 he married Anne Wojcicki, co-founder of the genetic-testing company 23andMe and sister of Google’s long-time executive Susan Wojcicki. They had two children and divorced in 2015. He later married the lawyer Nicole Shanahan; they divorced in 2023.

The Return

After ChatGPT was released at the end of 2022, Brin began coming back into Google’s offices. By 2023 he was working with the company’s AI researchers on Gemini, its family of AI models, with no executive title. In early 2025 he told Gemini staff that working sixty hours a week was the most productive pace, urging them to come into the office every weekday to win the race towards artificial general intelligence.

Demis Hassabis, who leads Google DeepMind, said in 2026 that Brin had been “in the weeds, programming”. Gemini’s success helped push Alphabet’s shares sharply higher, and Brin became once again one of the three or four richest people in the world.

Cars and Airships

Of the projects Brin oversaw at Google X, the one that has lasted longest is the self-driving car. Google began the project in 2009, and Brin was often seen riding in the early test vehicles and arguing that driverless cars would one day save many of the lives lost on the roads. The project became Waymo, which runs paid robotaxi services in several American cities.

His airship company, LTA Research, built a new rigid airship called Pathfinder 1, which received permission to fly in 2023 and began test flights over California. It is intended to carry aid to disaster areas that are hard to reach by road.

Funding Science

His approach to Parkinson’s research reflects the engineer in him. Rather than give to a single institution, he has funded large, open research programmes, including Aligning Science Across Parkinson’s, which requires researchers to share their data and results quickly. He has argued that faster sharing, rather than more secrecy, is what speeds up discovery.

He and Page still hold shares that give them control of a majority of Alphabet’s votes, so the company’s long-term direction still depends, in the end, on the two graduate students who met on a campus tour.

Why the Family Left

Brin has said that his father decided the family must emigrate after attending a mathematics conference in Warsaw in 1978, where he met Western colleagues and saw how much freedom they had. The family applied for exit visas; his father was dismissed from his job and his mother had to leave hers while they waited. Brin has said that he is grateful to his parents for taking that risk, and that he understands the hardship they went through better now than he did as a child.

That sense of an outsider’s luck runs through his public remarks. In 2017 he joined protests at San Francisco airport against a US ban on travellers from several Muslim-majority countries, saying he was there because he was a refugee.

He can also be blunt about Google’s mistakes. In 2024, speaking to a group of AI developers, he said that Google had “definitely messed up” when its Gemini image generator produced historically inaccurate pictures, and that the company had not tested it thoroughly enough.

Colleagues describe him as more comfortable with engineers than with executives, and he has said that working on AI is the most exciting technical problem of his life.

The measure of him is the return. Very few founders go back to the engineering floor of the company they created, decades later, with nothing to prove and no title to hold. Brin did, because the technology had become interesting again.

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