Sergey Brin

Sergey Brin
Born	Sergey Mikhailovich Brin 21 8, 1973
Birthplace	Moscow, Soviet Union
Nationality	American
Occupation	Computer scientist, businessman, investor
Known for	Co-founding Google, former president of Alphabet Inc.
Education	University of Maryland, College Park (B.S.); Stanford University (graduate studies)
Awards	National Science Foundation Fellowship, Marconi Foundation Prize, National Academy of Engineering member

Sergey Mikhailovich Brin (Template:Lang-ru; born August 21, 1973) is an American computer scientist and businessman who co-founded Google alongside Larry Page in 1998. Born in Moscow during the Soviet era, Brin immigrated to the United States at age six with his family, eventually rising to build one of the most consequential technology companies in history. He served as president of Alphabet Inc., Google's parent company, from its formation in 2015 until he stepped down from the role on December 3, 2019. Brin and Page remain at Alphabet as co-founders, controlling shareholders, and members of the board of directors. As of January 2026, Forbes estimated Brin's net worth at approximately $253.1 billion, placing him among the wealthiest individuals in the world. Following several years away from day-to-day operations, Brin returned to active involvement at Alphabet in late 2023, contributing to the company's artificial intelligence research efforts. His career has spanned the early development of web search technology, the creation of one of the world's largest corporations, and a more recent focus on artificial intelligence.

Early Life

Sergey Mikhailovich Brin was born on August 21, 1973, in Moscow, in what was then the Soviet Union. His family had deep roots in mathematics and the sciences. His father, Mikhail Brin, was a mathematician, and his grandfather had also pursued a career in mathematics. The Brin family was Jewish, and like many Jewish families in the Soviet Union, they faced systemic discrimination that limited their professional and academic opportunities.

In 1979, when Sergey was six years old, the Brin family emigrated from the Soviet Union to the United States. The decision to leave was driven in significant part by the restrictions placed on Jewish academics and professionals in Soviet society. The family settled in the United States, where Mikhail Brin took a position as a mathematics professor at the University of Maryland.

Growing up in the academic environment of College Park, Maryland, young Sergey was exposed early to mathematics and computing. His father's career at the University of Maryland provided a scholarly household that encouraged intellectual curiosity and rigorous study. The formative influence of his family's mathematical background would play a direct role in shaping his academic path and, ultimately, his approach to organizing and retrieving information on the web.

Brin has spoken in interviews about how his family's experience emigrating from the Soviet Union shaped his worldview. The experience of leaving a closed society for one with greater freedoms and opportunities left a lasting impression, informing both his personal outlook and his later professional emphasis on access to information.

Education

Brin attended the University of Maryland, College Park, where he followed in the footsteps of his father and grandfather by studying mathematics. He also pursued computer science, earning a Bachelor of Science degree with honors in mathematics and computer science.

After completing his undergraduate studies, Brin enrolled at Stanford University in September 1993 to pursue a Ph.D. in computer science. At Stanford, he received a Graduate Fellowship from the National Science Foundation, which supported his doctoral research. His research interests at Stanford centered on data mining, search engines, and the extraction of information from large datasets. It was at Stanford that he met Larry Page, a fellow computer science doctoral student, and the two began collaborating on a research project that would evolve into Google. Brin ultimately took a leave of absence from the Ph.D. program to focus on building the company, and he did not complete his doctorate.

In a 2026 interview, Brin reflected on the role of formal education, noting that Google hires many employees without traditional degrees, observing that some people "just figure things out on their own." He has also stated publicly that he chose to study computer science in part because of the practical career opportunities the field offered.

Career

Development of BackRub and early search technology

While at Stanford University in the mid-1990s, Brin and Larry Page began working together on a research project aimed at improving the way information was organized and retrieved on the rapidly growing World Wide Web. Their collaboration produced a search engine initially called "BackRub," which operated on Stanford's servers beginning in 1996. The system's distinguishing innovation was its use of the link structure of the web — specifically, analyzing which pages linked to which other pages — as a way of determining the relative importance and relevance of a given web page. This approach, which Brin and Page formalized in a concept they called PageRank, represented a fundamental departure from existing search engines, which relied primarily on keyword matching.

The BackRub project gained popularity among users at Stanford and attracted attention from the broader technology community. As the project grew in scope and traffic, Brin and Page recognized its commercial potential and began seeking ways to develop it beyond the university setting.

Founding of Google

In 1998, Brin and Page incorporated Google Inc., establishing the company's initial operations in the garage of Susan Wojcicki in Menlo Park, California. The name "Google" was derived from "googol," the mathematical term for the number 1 followed by 100 zeros, reflecting the founders' mission to organize what appeared to be a nearly infinite amount of information on the internet.

The early growth of Google was rapid. The search engine's ability to deliver more relevant results than its competitors attracted a fast-growing user base. Brin and Page secured early funding from angel investors and venture capital firms, including an initial investment from Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems. In 1999, the company secured $25 million in venture capital funding from Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins.

Brin served in several leadership roles during Google's formative years. He was involved in the development of the company's core technology, its product strategy, and its organizational culture. The company went public on August 19, 2004, via an unconventional Dutch auction-style initial public offering (IPO) on the NASDAQ stock exchange.

At Google, Brin oversaw a range of products and initiatives as the company expanded beyond search. He was involved in the development of Google News, Gmail, and other services that broadened the company's reach. Brin was also closely associated with Google's more experimental projects, including the development of Google Glass and the company's self-driving car initiative, which later became the independent Alphabet subsidiary Waymo.

The culture of innovation at Google, often characterized by its "20 percent time" policy (which encouraged engineers to spend a portion of their working hours on personal projects), reflected Brin's research-oriented background. The policy contributed to the development of several significant Google products.

Alphabet Inc. and leadership transition

In October 2015, Google underwent a major corporate restructuring. A new parent company, Alphabet Inc., was created to oversee Google and its various subsidiaries, which spanned areas including life sciences, self-driving vehicles, venture capital, and other technology ventures. Brin assumed the role of president of Alphabet Inc., while Page became its CEO. Under this structure, Google remained Alphabet's largest subsidiary and primary revenue generator, focused on internet services and advertising.

On December 3, 2019, Brin stepped down from his role as president of Alphabet. Page simultaneously stepped down as CEO. Sundar Pichai, who had been serving as CEO of Google, assumed the additional role of CEO of Alphabet. Brin and Page retained their positions on Alphabet's board of directors and maintained their controlling interest in the company through their ownership of supervoting Class B shares.

Return to active involvement and AI research

After stepping down from his executive role, Brin maintained a lower public profile for several years. However, in December 2023, he returned to active involvement at Alphabet, focusing specifically on the company's artificial intelligence research efforts. This return coincided with a period of intense competition in the AI industry, as technology companies raced to develop and deploy large language models and other advanced AI systems.

Brin's re-engagement with Alphabet's AI work was reported as a significant development within the company. His return to hands-on technical work, after years of relative disengagement from daily operations, drew attention both within the technology industry and in the broader media. Commentators noted that Brin's "unretirement" illustrated the difficulty that some founders have in fully stepping away from the companies they built.

Business and investment activities

Beyond his role at Alphabet, Brin has been associated with various investment and business activities. In early 2026, multiple news outlets reported that Brin and Page had moved a limited liability company out of California, a development that coincided with discussions of a proposed billionaire's tax in the state. Bloomberg reported in January 2026 that Brin was linked to the purchase of a $42 million mansion on the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe.

In January 2026, The New York Times reported that Brin donated $20 million to a new political effort in California, described as a billionaire-backed campaign connected to debates over proposed wealth taxes in the state. The Wall Street Journal reported that the Brin-backed group, called "Building a Better California," was funding ballot measures that sought to undercut the proposed billionaire's tax.

Personal Life

Brin married Anne Wojcicki, co-founder of the personal genetics company 23andMe, in May 2007. The ceremony was held in the Bahamas. Wojcicki is the sister of the late Susan Wojcicki, in whose garage Google was founded and who later served as CEO of YouTube. The New York Times reported on the relationship and wedding in September 2007.

In 2008, Brin publicly disclosed that genetic testing through 23andMe had revealed he carried a mutation in the LRPK2 gene associated with a higher risk of developing Parkinson's disease. He discussed the implications of this discovery for his personal health decisions and his support for genetic research.

Brin and Wojcicki later divorced. The personal aspects of Brin's life have occasionally intersected with public interest due to his prominence in the technology industry, but he has generally maintained a relatively private existence compared to some of his peers in the technology sector.

Brin is a naturalized American citizen who has spoken publicly about the influence his family's emigration from the Soviet Union had on his appreciation for the freedoms and opportunities available in the United States.

Recognition

Brin has received numerous awards and honors for his contributions to computer science, technology, and entrepreneurship.

He was a recipient of a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, which supported his doctoral research at Stanford University.

In 2002, Brin was named to the MIT Technology Review TR100 (now TR35) list of top innovators under the age of 35, in recognition of his work on web search technology.

In 2009, Brin and Page were elected to the National Academy of Engineering for their contributions to engineering, specifically for the development of Google and its impact on information access worldwide.

Brin and Page were jointly listed in Forbes' ranking of the most powerful people in the world on multiple occasions, reflecting the global influence of the company they built.

Brin has also received recognition from IE Business School, which awarded him and Page the IE Business School Entrepreneurship Award, honoring their impact on global entrepreneurship and business innovation.

In the local business community, Brin was recognized alongside other technology leaders in the San Francisco Bay Area for his contributions to business and the community.

Legacy

Sergey Brin's impact on the technology industry and on modern life more broadly is principally associated with his role in co-founding Google, which transformed the way billions of people access and interact with information. The PageRank algorithm, which he co-developed with Larry Page at Stanford, introduced a fundamentally new approach to web search that prioritized the structural relationships between web pages rather than relying solely on the content of individual pages. This innovation was central to Google's rapid rise and the subsequent dominance of its search engine.

Under Brin's involvement, Google expanded from a search engine into a diversified technology conglomerate spanning internet advertising, cloud computing, consumer electronics, autonomous vehicles, and life sciences. The creation of Alphabet Inc. in 2015 formalized this diversification, and Brin's role as its president reflected his continued engagement with the company's broader ambitions.

Brin's personal story — an immigrant from the Soviet Union who became one of the most prominent figures in American technology — has been cited in numerous discussions of immigration policy, the American technology sector's reliance on immigrant talent, and the opportunities afforded by the American educational system. His academic background in mathematics and computer science, and his path through the University of Maryland and Stanford, exemplify the pipeline from research universities to the technology industry.

His return to active involvement in Alphabet's artificial intelligence research in late 2023 signaled a renewed personal engagement with the cutting-edge technical work that defined his early career. This decision placed him at the center of one of the most consequential areas of technological development in the 2020s, as AI systems began to reshape industries ranging from healthcare to media to software engineering.

Brin's more recent activities, including his 2026 political donations related to California's proposed wealth tax and his involvement in ballot measure efforts, have also positioned him as a public figure in policy debates around taxation and wealth in the United States.