Sergey Brin Net Worth 2024: Earning $125 Billion by Inventing Google Search

Sergey Brin, the world-famous Russian-born American computer scientist, is one of the few centibillionaires in the world today. His fame comes from his invention of Google, and so does the bulk of his fortune.

As of 2024, Sergey Brin’s net worth is over $125 billion, growing alongside Google’s.

Sergey Brin co-founded Google with his Stanford classmate Larry Page and served as the head of technology of the company for 10 years, followed by his time as the Director of Special Projects. Even though he stepped down from his day-to-day position, he is still very much involved in the work of Alphabet Inc, the parent company of Google.

In this article, we’ll explore the details, entrepreneurial ventures, and investments that aided in his wealth accumulation.

Sergey Brin’s Net Worth Breakdown:

Being one of the richest people in the world, you’d think that Sergey Brin’s life would be constantly in the public eye.

However, he and his business partner Larry Page are very private, so there’s very little to learn about their personal investments and many of their projects outside of Google. Still, we managed to uncover the main sources of Brin’s net worth.

Here is a breakdown of what made him billions over the years:

5 Fun Facts About Sergey Brin

1. Immigrant Success Story: Born in Moscow, Russia, Sergey Brin immigrated to the United States with his family at the age of six to escape anti-Semitism. His family’s move laid the foundation for his future success in tech.
2. Academic Excellence: Brin holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from the University of Maryland and earned his Master’s degree from Stanford University. It was at Stanford where he met Larry Page, leading to their collaboration on Google.
3. First Office: Google started in Susan Wojcicki’s garage in Menlo Park, California. Susan later became a high-ranking executive at Google and CEO of YouTube.
4. Private Pilot: Sergey Brin is a licensed pilot and has a keen interest in aviation, which led him to co-own a private airport with Larry Page near Google’s headquarters in Mountain View.
5. Philanthropic Efforts: Brin has donated over $1 billion through his Sergey Brin Family Foundation, focusing on Parkinson’s disease research—a condition that runs in his family.

Latest News & Updates About Sergey Brin

• Increased Focus on AI at Alphabet: Sergey Brin has reportedly become more involved with Alphabet’s AI initiatives. With the rapid advancements in artificial intelligence, Brin has been contributing to the strategic direction of AI development, particularly with Google DeepMind. His return to a more active role emphasizes the importance of AI in shaping Google’s future​.
• Philanthropic Expansion: Brin’s foundation has ramped up donations to research institutions focused on neurodegenerative diseases, especially Parkinson’s. This renewed focus aligns with his personal commitment to finding a cure, given his family’s genetic predisposition to the disease. In 2024, he pledged additional funding for gene therapy research, marking one of the largest individual contributions in the field​.
• Real Estate Moves in Malibu: Brin made headlines by purchasing two high-profile properties in Malibu, California, with a combined value of nearly $50 million. The acquisitions further highlight his preference for maintaining a low profile in secluded, high-end areas while expanding his real estate portfolio​.
• Focus on Sustainable Tech: Like his co-founder Larry Page, Brin has been investing in clean energy and futuristic transportation, including companies working on sustainable aviation. His interest in alternative energy aligns with the broader trend in Silicon Valley towards environmentally friendly innovations​.

 The Early Life of the Father of Search

Sergey Mikhailovich Brin was born on August 21, 1973, in Moscow, Russia, to Mikhail and Eugenia Brin, graduates of Moscow State University. His father, a Russian Jew, is a retired math professor at the University of Maryland.

His mother is a researcher at the Goddard Space Flight Center at NASA.

Up until Sergey Brin was six years old, the family lived in an apartment in central Moscow with his paternal grandmother. When his father returned from a conference in Warsaw, Poland in 1997, the family decided to emigrate, so they formally applied for an exit visa in September the following year.

Because of the visa request, Brin’s father was fired from his job and his mother had to leave her post, too. They worked temporary jobs while waiting for their visa to be approved, and in 1979, the family was finally granted an official exit visa to leave the country.

Right after leaving Moscow, the Brin family lived in Paris and Vienna and received support from the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. Once Mikhail Brin secured a teaching position at the University of Maryland, they moved to the United States.

After the move, Sergey Brin attended elementary school at Paint Branch Montessori School in Adelphi, Maryland, and was also home-taught. Since he was taught math by his father from a very early age, it didn’t come as a surprise that Brin exhibited an extraordinary aptitude for solving math problems, even at an early age.

He went on to study at Eleanor Roosevelt High School in Maryland.

After graduation, he enrolled in the University of Maryland and received his Bachelor of Science in Computer Science in 1993 with honors in mathematics and computer science. He was only 19 years old at the time.

That same year, Brin became an intern at Wolfram Research, the developer company of Mathematica.

He also enrolled at Stanford University on a graduate fellowship from the National Science Foundation to study computer science and received his MS in 1995.

Driven by his thirst for knowledge, Sergey Brin enrolled in a Ph.D. program in computer science at Stanford University. During his time there, he would make the one friendship that would help turn him into a billionaire. He met Larry Page, his lifelong friend and collaborator. Not long after, Larry Page and Sergey Brin co-founded Google, potentially the most influential company in the world today.

As for his personal life today, Sergey Brin was initially married to fellow internet entrepreneur Anne Wojcicki.

His marriage lasted between 2007 and 2015. Anne’s sister Susan Wojcicki (who is now the CEO of YouTube) allowed Larry Page and Sergey Brin to use her garage to launch Google in 1998 and was later a high-ranking executive at the company. Brin has two children with Anne. In 2013, it was announced that the couple separated after Brin’s extramarital affair with Amanda Rosenberg, the marketing director of Google Glass. They finalized the divorce in 2015.

After the divorce, Brin married Nicole Shanahan in 2018 and had a child with her. The couple divorced in January 2022 after she allegedly had an affair with Elon Musk, one of Brin’s oldest friends. Consequently, Sergey Brin sold his Tesla stocks, though this is unconfirmed, and at one point, Musk stated the following on his Twitter account:

“This is total bs. Sergey and I are friends and were at a party together last night! I’ve only seen Nicole twice in three years, both times with many other people around. Nothing romantic.”

This is total bs. Sergey and I are friends and were at a party together last night!

I’ve only seen Nicole twice in three years, both times with many other people around. Nothing romantic.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 25, 2022

Sergey Brin Net Worth: From a PhD Dissertation to Multibillion Dollar Conglomerate

At an orientation program that welcomed new students at Stanford University, Sergey Brin met his fellow student Larry Page. Their friendship is one for the century since the two created something that forever changed the World Wide Web.

While at the university, Brin authored over a dozen papers on pattern extraction and data mining for leading academic journals, including:

• Extracting Patterns and Relations from the World Wide Web
• Dynamic Itemset Counting and Implication Rules for Market Basket Data
• Scalable Technique for Mining Casual Structures
• Beyond Market Baskets Generalizing Association Rules to Correlations

In addition to this, he designed a TeX to HTML translation software app and created a website for film ratings. However, his biggest success while at the university was his joint project with Larry Page, initially dubbed BackRub.

The Beginnings of Google: Creating BackRub

Larry Page recruited his new friend Brin to join his research project. The idea was to find a method to determine how many web pages link to a given page. Before this, the facilities for web search only ranked search results by the frequency of keyword appearance, so the results gave endless lists of websites without accuracy in terms of user’s query.

Page found a much more useful method – ranking websites by the number of links coming from other sites. This was the foundation for the new creation by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the famous PageRank.

Brin said:

We developed a way of ranking web pages called PageRank, which determined relevance by counting and analyzing links. This technique set us apart from other search engines and laid the foundation for Google’s success.

Soon enough, they used their hypothesis to develop the prototype for their first search engine, BackRub, which exploited backlinks to estimate the importance of websites.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin co-wrote the paper titled The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, which became the most downloaded scientific document in the history of the internet.

Backrub existed on a mixture of personal computers that Page kept in his dorm room. In 1996, the search engine was ready to be publicly used online and was made available on the Stanford University website.

However, they were using too many of Stanford’s resources, which was a problem for the University and eventually got the duo kicked off campus.

In 1997, they registered the domain name google.com. It started as Googol, a term that referred to the number written as one followed by 100 zeros, which describes the vast universe of data that the search engine was meant to explore.

Being kicked out of campus was one of the best things to happen to Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Why? This ended in them creating Google Co., a monumental enterprise that the entire world knows today.

Launching Google

In September 1998, Brin and Page incorporated Google Corp and raised $100,000 from David Cheriton, one of their Stanford professors. The professor’s smart investment would eventually become worth $2.3 billion!

The duo also got a $100,000 investment from Andy Bechtolsheim, Sun Microsystems’ co-founder.

After switching several office locations, the new company leased a complex of buildings in 1999 in Mountain View, California, and set down roots. Google has since bought the entire property and it is now known as Google Plex, one of the most creative workplaces in the world.

A year later, Google started selling text-based ads associated with search keywords, building up the popularity of the search engine.

That same year, Page and Brin attended the Academy of Achievement’s International Achievement Summit in London as graduate student delegates. Four years later, they returned to the summit in Chicago as recipients of the Golden Plate Award by the Academy.

By 2001, with the competition of Google Co. growing, the company was explosive on the market and was already turning a profit.

At the beginning, Larry Page served as the CEO of Google, but they decided to recruit Eric Schmidt, Novell’s executive, to take over the position, with Page taking the role of President for Products and Brin becoming President for Technology.

After the duo turned into a trio, the company started growing at a whirlwind pace. Google’s initial public offering in 2004 gave the company a market capitalization of $23 billion and raised $1.67 billion. People with shares in Google Co. became millionaires overnight and Page and Brin were the richest of them all – and at the age of 27!

Google Continues to Blossom

By 2006, Google had over 10,000 employees and its annual revenue was over $10 billion. A year later, Fortune Magazine ranked Google as the best company in the world to work for.

In addition to the in-house product development, Google made many strategic acquisitions of software companies with varied products. In 2006, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin decided to take one of the smartest steps in the history of the company – the purchase of YouTube. They bought the video platform for $1.65 billion.

In 2007, Google acquired DoubleClick, a technology company, for $3.1 billion. Google used its arsenal of technology to improve online advertising, which soon led to the invention of AdWords.

In addition to this, Google created AdSense, Google Analytics, and an array of other popular products we still use today. The larger acquisition that Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin decided on was buying Motorola Mobility, which cost them $12.5 billion in 2011.

In 2015, Google was reorganized as a holding company. Today, all of the products fall under the parent company of Google, Alphabet Inc. Google’s product chief, Sundar Pichai became the CEO while Brin was the first president of Alphabet.

In 2019, Sergey Brin and Larry Page announced that they would step down from their executive positions with Alphabet, but would continue to serve on the board. Brin is a board member even today.

These days, Google is still the most powerful search engine and internet company in the world by far with a duopoly in online advertising and a monopoly in online search. It reaches over a billion people per day through YouTube, search, Google Maps, and Gmail.

Sergey Brin’s Role at Google

Reportedly, Sergey Brin and his partner earn a $1 salary per year from Alphabet. Their earnings from Google are solely based on the value of their stock.

Founder Sergey Brin has done much more than just inventing Google with his partner. He served as Google’s Head of Technology for a decade before he transitioned to President of Google’s parent company Alphabet, which is the current title of the brand. Reportedly, Brin spends most of his energy in the robotics lab at the company and is a fierce advocate of alternative energy consumption. As such, he has invested a lot of his fortune into venture funds and clean technology initiatives.

In recent years, the co-founders have been implementing AI into Google, being more involved in the company than they’ve been for a while. The success of AI has brought more than $18 billion into each of their net worth. This has made Page and Brin the seventh and eighth richest people in the world, respectively.

Brin’s Stake in Alphabet Inc.

Even though Brin and Page have a relatively small stake in Google, the partners have super-voting shares – Class B shares – and therefore control the majority of the company’s voting. Of course, being one of the biggest companies in the world means that a small stake equals billions, ergo the sizeable estimated net worth of Brin.

Sergey Brin owns 5.7% of Alphabet Inc. compared to a 6.1% stake that belongs to his partner, which is why there is a discrepancy between their wealth. Brin owns Class B shares and Class C shares of Alphabet, including 19 million shares of the Class C stock.

Together, the co-founders control a majority of Class B shares, which gives them over 50% of the voting power, allowing them to exert the most significant influence over the leadership and direction of the company – despite not having a majority stake in the common shares.

If we stop to consider that Alphabet’s cap ownership value is set at $1.83 trillion, this would mean that Sergey Brin’s stake is worth over $70 billion today.

Achievements and Awards

As the co-founder of Google and a computer science whiz, Brin has accumulated an array of awards over the years. Some of his most notable accomplishments to date include:

• Named in the MIT Technology Review as one of the Top 100 innovators in 2002
• Honorary MBA from IE Business School in 2003
• Awarded the Marconi Foundation Prize in 2004
• Instated in Columbia University as Fellow of the Marconi Foundation in 2004
• Awarded the Golden Plate Award from the American Academy of Achievement in 2004
• Inducted into the National Academy of Engineering in 2009
• Awarded the Computer Pioneer Award from the IEEE Computer Society

Philanthropic Efforts

Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin is a major philanthropist. He is the founder of the Sergey Brin Family Foundation, an organization that has invested a fortune in social causes.

Since his mother’s diagnosis of Parkinson’s and his discovery that he has the genetic mutation, Brin has become the largest individual donor to Parkinson’s research, all through the Sergey Brin Family Foundation. So far, he has donated $1.1 billion to fund research on the disease.

What Else Has Sergey Brin Invested In?

Sergey Brin might be the co-founder of Google, but this is far from his only accomplishment. In addition to his work for Google, Brin has ventured into various business endeavors and made many notable investments that have contributed to his net worth.

Notable Investments

While Google’s co-founder is quite private, he has made many strategic investments that have brought him hundreds of millions in wealth over the years. He’s invested in artificial intelligence through DeepMind and Google Brain, in biotechnology through Verily Life Sciences, and in space tourism through Planetary Resources and SpaceX.

For quite some time, Sergey Brin had a large sum invested in Tesla, as well as his ex-wife’s company 23andMe. Larry Page and Sergey Brin led a $40 million investment round in Musk’s company through Google back in 2006, and Brin was the fourth person in the world to own a Tesla Model X Crossover SUV.

While some say that he sold his stake in Tesla after his divorce, this is not confirmed.

He has also invested $4.5 million in a space tourism company called Space Adventures, based in Virginia.

Assets

After visiting the Ames Research Center, Brin and Page decided to build their own airport in 2014, which is now located near Google’s Mountain View headquarters. This investment cost them $82 million.

He also has a fortune in real estate, as well as other valuable assets, many of which he hasn’t discussed publicly.

Real Estate

Google’s co-founder Brin owns an $8.5 million penthouse in West Village, New York City, as well as a large estate in a secret location in Los Altos Hills in California.

In 2022, he bought a Malibu property in the Point Dume neighborhood for $13.5 million. A few months later, he bought a second property in the area for $35 million.

Yachts, Cars, and Private Jets

In 2011, Brin spent $80 million on his 73-meter yacht named Dragonfly. He and Larry Page own at least two private jets they keep on their airfield, a customized Boeing 767-200 and a Dornier Alpha Jet.

For a centibillionaire, Google’s co-founder doesn’t have an extravagant car collection. Brin’s car collection includes:

• Toyota Prius worth $27,000
• Audi A6 worth $51,000
• Lincoln Navigator worth $76,000
• Tesla Model S worth $110,000

In 2012, Google’s staff played a car prank on April Fool’s on Brin by turning his Model S Tesla into a pink Batmobile.

What Can We Learn From Sergey Brin’s Story?

Sergey Brin’s life and success have much to teach us. For one, he exemplifies the entrepreneurial spirit. His story is more impressive if you consider that he embarked on this journey from a very early age.

He became the co-founder of one of the most important companies in the world while still studying at university.

Brin has been involved in many groundbreaking projects that expand beyond Google’s search engine, such as Google Glass and the development of Alphabet Inc. His commitment to push technological boundaries and explore new ideas reflects a commitment to innovation.

Brin’s success is not only his own, however. His partnership with Larry Page proved the immense value of determined, brilliant people working towards the same goal.

The decision to start Google was a significant risk and a massive commitment given the competitive landscape of the time. But, Brin was willing to take risks and venture into uncharted territories, which is perhaps the most impressive aspect of his success.

Finally, while Brin is not a majority stakeholder of general shares, he holds control – with Page – of decision-making shares, making him one of the two biggest decision-makers in Alphabet, showing savvy to retain ultimate control of one of the biggest companies in the world.