The Mind Behind Google: Sergey Brin and His Billion-Dollar Empire

Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google is a perfect example of what a nurturing environment can do for a kid. Born to mathematician parents in Moscow, Russia, Sergey was exposed to an intellect-filled environment right from the very beginning. His parents decided to move to the U.S. in 1979 when he was only 6, reportedly due to the persecution of Jews in the Soviet Union at that time. He met Larry Page during an orientation program at Standford, a meeting that would forever change the face of the internet. Brin produced a paper titled "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine", which became the most downloaded scientific document in history. 

The two worked on converting the backlink data that was gathered by BackRub's web crawler and producing them in web pages ranked by importance, which gave the world the very first PageRank algorithm. They used this algorithm to build the search engine we know today, Google. With an invention like this, it should come as no surprise that he is currently among the richest people on the planet. Here's an overview of his background, career, and wealth.

What is Sergey Brin's net worth?

The Russian-born American computer engineer, Sergey Brin is worth a mind-boggling $111 billion at the time of writing, as per Celebrity Net Worth. The co-founders of Google own around 6% of the parent company Alphabet's outstanding equity each.

The duo raised $100k from one of their graduate professors for their domain called, "Googol" which is a number that has a hundred zeroes after 1. The investment that they bagged from their professor is worth more than $2.3 billion today. Between 2012 to 2019, Sergey's net worth rose from $12 billion to an astounding $60 billion.

A look at Sergey Brin's real estate, yachts, and more

Sergey bought a 3,500 sq ft. penthouse in NYC's west village for a towering $8.5 million. Apart from this, he owns an estate in Los Altos Hills, California. He also has a home in Malibu which he bought for $13.5 million and another in Point Dume which he bought for $35 million. Built in 1952, this estate boasts breathtaking views of the coastline. The gated community is spread over 6000sq m of living space and features six bedrooms and six bathrooms. 

Apart from all this, Sergey Brin also has $100 billion in assets that are managed by his family office which also manages another secretive $5 billion charitable foundation donations.

Sergey Brin has also invested $4.5 million in a Virginia-based space tourism company called Space Adventures. The two co-founders of Google jointly own a Boeing 767-200 and a Dassault/Dornier Alpha Jet, for which the duo pays $1.3 million a year for maintenance, as per The New York Times. Apart from this, Brin also supports the LTA Research & Exploration LLC, which is an airship-making company.

Sergey Brin's role in Google

Sergey Brin was the company's tech head for more than a decade before he served as the President of Google's parent company Alphabet, which is his current role. He spends a lot of time focusing on improving the world's energy issues and has invested his personal assets into venture funds and clean technology projects. He and Larry Page both earn a salary of $1 per year from the company. Apart from having stocks in Google, Brin also invested around $40 million in Tesla back in 2006 which he reportedly sold later due to a personal issue. Apart from having equity stakes in Tesla he also has stakes in 23andMe, a genomics and biotechnology company.