Sergey Brin

Sergey Brin was six when his family left the Soviet Union. His father, a mathematician, had announced after a 1977 conference trip to Warsaw that Soviet antisemitism made staying impossible, and the exit-visa application that followed cost both parents their jobs and left the family with no steady income for eight months while they waited to learn whether they would be allowed to go. They were, in May 1979, and after a stretch in Vienna and Paris while his father found a teaching post at the University of Maryland, the family reached the United States that October. Brin finished a computer science degree at Maryland in 1993, with honors, at nineteen, then went to Stanford on an NSF fellowship to start a doctorate he never finished.

He met Larry Page at Stanford orientation in 1995, and the two disagreed about nearly everything until they didn't: Brin's interest in data mining and Page's idea for ranking pages by their citations combined into an algorithm they called PageRank, running first out of their dorm rooms and then, in 1998, out of a rented Menlo Park garage that belonged to a friend named Susan Wojcicki. Both dropped their doctorates. Google grew from a Stanford research project into the company that reorganized how the internet finds anything, and Brin ran its parent company, Alphabet, as president until stepping down from day-to-day management in 2019. He came out of that retirement in 2023 to work directly on Gemini, the company's answer to AI systems that had, for the first time since 1998, threatened to make search itself obsolete.

In 2008, the same year Google's algorithms were mapping the entire internet, Brin had his own genome mapped and learned he carries a mutation in the LRRK2 gene that raises his lifetime risk of developing Parkinson's disease to somewhere between thirty and seventy-five percent, the disease his mother, Eugenia, had already been diagnosed with. He has since given more than a billion dollars to Parkinson's research, treating his own biology the way he had once treated the web, as a dataset to be searched for a pattern. His first marriage ended less abstractly. In 2013 it emerged that Brin had been having an affair with a colleague on the Google Glass team, the wearable-computing project he had personally championed, and by 2015 the marriage he had built alongside Google was over.

He is 53, still a working engineer at his own company's AI lab, and the reputation is more unsettled than at any point since 1998. Two decades of being one half of "the Google guys" gave way, in 2026, to a different profile: a seat on Donald Trump's science advisory council, and reporting that he had spent fifty-seven million dollars fighting a California wealth tax after years of backing causes on the political left. Whether that reflects a genuine change of conviction or simply money defending itself is an argument still being had in public, not a verdict this page can offer.

Sergey Brin's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

• The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine article
  The PageRank paper, written with Larry Page 1998
• Google company
  Founded with Larry Page in a rented Menlo Park garage 1998
• Project Glass (Google Glass) invention
  Wearable-computing project he personally championed 2013
• Pathfinder 1 invention
  LTA Research airship, the largest since the Hindenburg to fly 2023

• August 21, 1973 aged 0 Born in Moscow, Soviet Union
• October 25, 1979 aged 6 Emigrates with his family to the United States
• 1993 aged ~20 Earns a B.S. in computer science from the University of Maryland
• 1995 aged ~22 Meets Larry Page at Stanford orientation
• 1998 aged ~25 Co-founds Google in a rented Menlo Park garage
• May 2007 aged 33 Marries Anne Wojcicki
• 2008 aged ~35 Learns he carries a Parkinson's-linked gene mutation
• 2013 aged ~40 Introduces Project Glass — his marriage to Wojcicki ends soon after
• 2019 aged ~46 Steps down as president of Alphabet

• Larry Page b. 1973
  Co-founder of Google whose search algorithm became the foundation of the modern internet economy. co-founded with
• Susan Wojcicki 1968–2024
  Former CEO of YouTube who helped build Google and oversaw the video platform's explosive growth. rented her garage
• Eric Schmidt b. 1955
  Former Google CEO whose tenure saw the company's explosive growth into a tech giant. appointed
• Elon Musk b. 1971
  Engineer and entrepreneur whose companies have advanced electric vehicles, reusable rockets, and neural interfaces. rival