The son of a Soviet mathematician economist, Sergey Brin was born on the 21st of August, 1973, in Moscow, Russia. His family migrated to the United States to escape Jewish persecution in 1979. After receiving his degree in mathematics and computer science from the University of Maryland at College Park, Brin enrolled with Stanford University, He met Larry Page, and the duo created a search engine that would sort web pages based on popularity. Since its launch in 1998, Google has become the most popular search engine in the world.
Internet entrepreneur and computer scientist Sergey Mikhaylovich Brin created Google with Larry Page, the two becoming billionaires as Google developed into the world’s most popular search engine and a media giant.
As a research project at Stanford University, Brin and Page created a search engine that displayed results according to the popularity of the pages, after concluding that the most popular result would often be the most useful. They called the search engine Google after the mathematical term “googol,” which is a 1 followed by 100 zeros, to reflect their ambition to organize the immense amount of information available on the Web.
After raising $1 million from family, friends and other investors, the pair launched the company in 1998. Headquartered in the heart of California’s Silicon Valley, Google held its initial public offering in August 2004, making Brin and Page billionaires. Google has since become the world’s most popular search engine, receiving an average of more than a trillion searches a day in 2016.
In 2006, Google purchased the most popular website for user-submitted streaming videos, YouTube, for $1.65 billion in stock. In 2012, Google unveiled its futuristic Google Glass, a type of wearable eyeglass-computer which featured touchpad and voice control, a LED illuminated display and a camera, to the public. While touted as the latest “it” in tech toys, concerns over privacy and safety and a lack of a clear purpose in everyday life ultimately stymied its success in the commercial market. Its technology however has been applied for several uses in healthcare, journalism and the military.
On August 10, 2015, Brin and Page announced that Google and its divisions were being restructured under the umbrella of a new parent company called Alphabet, with Brin and Page serving as Alphabet’s respective president and CEO.
In November 2016, Brin was ranked No. 13 on Forbes’ “Billionaires” list, and No. 10 among U.S. billionaires who made the list. According to Forbes.com, as of November 2016, Brin’s net worth was $37.9 billion. As director of special projects at Google, Brin shared the company’s day-to-day responsibilities with Page, who served as Google’s CEO, and Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of the company.
Brin was married to 23andMe co-founder Anne Wojcicki from 2007 until they separated in 2013 and finally divorced in 2015 after Brin had an affair with Google Glass marketing manager Amanda Rosenberg. He and Wojcicki have two children together.
