The Worst Decision
In the early months of 2020, Sergey Brin was sitting alone in a house that cost more than most buildings on earth, trying to read a physics textbook. He had retired — or tried to retire — from Alphabet Inc. in December 2019, stepping down as president of the holding company he and Larry Page had restructured into existence four years prior. The plan, as he later described it, was almost comically modest for a man worth north of $100 billion: sit in cafés, study quantum field theory, maybe think large thoughts at a gentle pace. "I want to hang out in cafes, read physics books," he told an audience years later, compressing the ambition of that season into a sentence that could have described a particularly aimless graduate student. Then the pandemic closed the cafés. And Brin, marooned in the kind of isolation that money cannot solve, found himself — his word — "spiraling."
Not spiraling in any dramatic, tabloid sense. Spiraling in the way that a mind built for relentless computation begins to eat itself when deprived of problems. "Just kind of stewing," he said. "Not being sharp." Here was a man who had co-invented the dominant information retrieval system of the twenty-first century, whose work had reorganized the architecture of human knowledge, who held a controlling stake in a $2 trillion company — and who discovered, in the silence of quarantine, that he could not simply will himself into contentment. The physics books sat open. The theorems blurred.
What pulled him back was a conversation at a party — the kind of offhand remark that bends a life. A man from OpenAI, someone named Dan, told Brin what should have been obvious: this was the most transformative moment in the history of computer science, and Brin was missing it. "He's right," Brin recalled thinking. He started going back to the Google office. Once a week. Then more. Then every day. The project that absorbed him would become Gemini, Google's flagship AI model, the company's answer to ChatGPT and the generative revolution it had fumbled. By 2025, Brin was back full-time, pushing 60-hour weeks on his engineers, telling Stanford students that retirement had been "the worst decision" he could have made.
The admission is striking not for its content — billionaire founders return to companies all the time — but for its candor. Brin is not a man given to public self-laceration. He has no social media presence. He has not granted a traditional interview in years. His appearances are closer to unicorn sightings than press tours: a hackathon in Hillsborough where attendees didn't recognize him until they Googled his face on the very search engine he built; a surprise walk-on at Google I/O where he joked about "torturing" Demis Hassabis. That he would stand before a room and say, plainly, that stepping away from intellectually demanding work had made him worse — less sharp, less whole — tells you something about what drives him that no net-worth figure or corporate timeline ever could.
This is a man who fled the Soviet Union at six, who argued with his future co-founder the day they met, who built a search engine in a dormitory and a company in a garage and a holding company modeled on Berkshire Hathaway, who watched the thing he helped create nearly miss the most important technological transition since the internet itself — and who came back, in cargo pants and a T-shirt, because he couldn't bear to be on the sidelines while the game changed.
By the Numbers
Sergey Brin and the Google Empire
$247BEstimated net worth (2025)
$2.1T+Alphabet market capitalization
6Google products with 2B+ users
$1MInitial funding raised for Google (1998)
$3.8B+Proceeds from Google's 2004 IPO
$1.65BYouTube acquisition price (2006)
$2.7BReported cost to bring Noam Shazeer back from Character.AI
The facts of Sergey Mikhailovich Brin's early life read like the first act of an immigrant novel so archetypal it would be rejected as fiction. Born August 21, 1973, in Moscow, the son of a mathematics professor and a NASA scientist, he spent his first years in a crowded 350-square-foot apartment shared with his parents and his paternal grandmother. His playground was a grim courtyard where he was taken for two hours daily regardless of the weather. The family was Jewish. This mattered enormously.
Michael Brin, Sergey's father, had wanted to be an astronomer. The Soviet system made that impossible. "Jews were excluded from the physics departments, in particular," the elder Brin later explained. He changed his major to mathematics, received nearly straight A's, and was still denied admission to graduate school because of his ethnicity. At Moscow State University, Jewish applicants took their entrance exams in separate rooms from non-Jewish students — rooms the students themselves called "gas chambers" — and were graded on a harsher scale. The professional ceiling was absolute. When Michael Brin returned from a mathematics conference in Warsaw in 1977 and discovered that his Western colleagues were "not monsters," he told his wife and mother: "We cannot stay here any more."
Eugenia Brin, Sergey's mother, who would go on to become a research scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, supported the decision. On October 25, 1979, the family — parents, grandmother, six-year-old Sergey — landed in the United States, sponsored by a Jewish resettlement community. Years later, when Sergey was seventeen, the family returned to Russia for a visit. The boy saw the crumbling infrastructure, the bleakness. "I think, if anything, I feel like I have gotten a gift by being in the States rather than growing up in Russia," he said. "It just makes me appreciate my life that much more."
The gift metaphor is interesting. Gifts are unearned. They arrive from outside. They impose no obligation and yet demand gratitude. Brin's relationship to America — and to the opportunities it afforded his family — has always carried this quality of grateful astonishment, as if the country's possibilities were slightly too good to be real, as if the whole thing might be revoked. It is a posture common among children of Soviet émigrés, this sense that freedom is contingent, that the ground beneath you might shift. It would shape everything he built.
Two Swords Sharpening
The meeting, in the summer of 1995, was inauspicious. Sergey Brin, twenty-one, was a second-year doctoral student in computer science at Stanford. Gregarious, opinionated, physically restless — he had volunteered to show prospective first-year students around campus. Larry Page, twenty-two, an engineering graduate from the University of Michigan, was in his tour group.
They argued immediately and at length. Walking up and down the hills of San Francisco, they debated urban planning, among other things. "I thought he was pretty obnoxious," Page later recalled. "He had really strong opinions about things, and I guess I did, too." Brin's counter: "We both found each other obnoxious. But we say it a little bit jokingly. Obviously we spent a lot of time talking to each other, so there was something there. We had a kind of bantering thing going."
Page — the son of Carl Victor Page, a University of Michigan computer science professor and pioneer in artificial intelligence, a man whose own father had worked on the assembly line at the Chevy plant in Flint — came to Stanford with a peculiar fascination. Not with making money from the internet, though Stanford alumni were getting rich doing exactly that. With the mathematical structure of the web itself. Each computer was a node; each hyperlink, a connection between nodes. The World Wide Web was, to Page's mind, the largest graph ever created, and it was growing at a rate that made careful study both urgent and nearly impossible.
Page chose as his adviser Terry Winograd, a pioneer in human-computer interaction. He began searching for a thesis topic and landed on the link structure of the web — specifically, the nontrivial problem of discovering which pages linked back to any given page. You could follow links forward. You could not easily trace them in reverse. This bothered Page in the way that only a structural asymmetry can bother a computer scientist.
The insight was borrowed from academia: in the world of scholarly publishing, a paper's importance is measured not just by what it says but by how often other papers cite it. Bibliometrics — the study of citations — had its own branch of science. Page wondered whether the same logic could be applied to web pages. A page linked to by many other pages, particularly important pages, was probably more important than a page nobody linked to. It was a simple idea. It was also, as it turned out, the idea.
To explore it, Page needed someone who understood data mining at scale. He turned to the obnoxious, gregarious, brilliantly mathematical Russian émigré down the hall. Brin's research interests at Stanford were precisely suited: extracting patterns and relations from large, unstructured data sets. "I was working on data mining," Brin explained, "the idea of taking large amounts of data, analyzing it for patterns and trying to extract relationships that are useful."
Together, they built a prototype. They called it BackRub — a name that, mercifully, did not survive. It ran on servers assembled from cheap components in Page's dormitory room, including at least one computer casing made from Lego bricks. The system crawled the web, tracked backlinks, and ranked pages by the number and quality of links pointing to them. They called the ranking algorithm PageRank — a pun on Larry's surname and the thing being ranked. The academic paper that described it, "The Anatomy of a Large-
Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine," became one of the most downloaded scientific documents in the history of the internet.
Sergey is pretty social; he likes meeting people. I thought he was pretty obnoxious. He had really strong opinions about things, and I guess I did, too.
The complementarity was precise. Page conceived the conceptual architecture — weighted ranking based on link structure. Brin figured out the math, the algorithms, the data mining machinery that could make it work at scale. One saw the web as a graph to be read; the other saw it as a data set to be mined. Between them, they had invented the thing that would organize human knowledge for the next quarter century.
A Check Made Out to a Company That Did Not Yet Exist
By 1998, the search engine was consuming Stanford's bandwidth and the patience of its systems administrators. Brin and Page needed to either commercialize the technology or abandon it. They tried, first, to sell it. They approached several companies, including AltaVista and Yahoo, offering to license the technology. The offers were declined. The existing search engines, which ranked results by keyword frequency rather than link structure, saw no reason to change.
So they did the thing that graduate students with a good idea and no money do: they went looking for capital. The story of the first investment has become Silicon Valley scripture. Andy Bechtolsheim — co-founder of Sun Microsystems, a man whose instinct for transformative technology was already legendary — saw a brief demo on the porch of a Stanford faculty member's house. He wrote a check for $100,000. The check was made out to "Google Inc." The company did not yet exist. There was no bank account to deposit it into. It sat in a desk drawer for weeks while Brin and Page incorporated.
Susan Wojcicki — who would later become employee number sixteen and eventually CEO of YouTube — rented them her garage in Menlo Park, California, for $1,700 a month. The garage became the first office. Inside: clunky desktop computers, a ping-pong table, bright blue carpet. Also inside: a Lego-built server and the conviction, shared by both founders, that the quality of search results should be determined by the democratic structure of the web itself, not by advertising dollars. This conviction — that you could build a company on the principle of returning the most relevant result regardless of commercial interest — would prove both idealistic and extraordinarily lucrative.
By mid-1999, they had raised $25 million in venture capital. The search engine was processing 500,000 queries per day. By 2004, users were accessing the site 200 million times daily — roughly 138,000 queries per minute.
Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one.
The Adult in the Playroom
In 2001, Brin and Page did something that most founder-run companies resist with existential ferocity: they hired a CEO. Eric Schmidt — a seasoned technology executive who had served as CTO of Sun Microsystems and CEO of Novell, a man whose gray-templed gravitas and corporate fluency marked him as the opposite of the two young founders in nearly every visible way — was brought in to, as Brin put it with characteristic bluntness, "provide adult supervision, basically."
The arrangement was unusual. Schmidt ran the company's day-to-day operations; most vice presidents reported to him. Page focused on product development and engineering. Brin zeroed in on deals, engineering, and the softer, harder-to-quantify realms of people, policy, and politics. In practice, Google was led by a triumvirate: three people who had to agree before anything significant moved.
Schmidt's role was to translate the founders' instincts into a structure that could scale. The founders' role was to ensure that scaling never diluted the thing that made Google different: the willingness to prioritize long-term, technically ambitious projects over quarterly earnings. This tension — between the discipline of a maturing company and the anarchic creativity of its origins — would define Google's internal culture for the next two decades.
The triumvirate held through the IPO, through YouTube, through Android, through the slow metamorphosis of a search company into something much stranger and larger. Schmidt eventually stepped aside in 2011, handing the CEO title back to Page. But the structure he helped build — the idea that Google needed both the founders' conviction and a professional operator's restraint — was the architecture that allowed two graduate students' dormitory experiment to become the scaffolding of the modern internet.
An Owner's Manual
On August 19, 2004, Google Inc. went public. The IPO was deliberately, almost confrontationally unconventional. Where most companies conducted roadshows to charm institutional investors, Google used a Dutch auction — a mechanism designed to let the market, rather than the underwriters, set the price. The founders' letter to prospective shareholders, filed with the SEC as part of the S-1 registration statement, was modeled explicitly on
Warren Buffett's annual letters to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders.
The letter is, in retrospect, one of the most remarkable corporate documents of the early twenty-first century — not because it was beautifully written (it was workmanlike) but because it said, with startling frankness, what the company intended to do and how it intended to treat its investors:
"Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one."
The core argument was about control. Brin and Page had implemented a dual-class voting structure that gave them and Schmidt effective control over all corporate decisions, regardless of how shares traded or who held them. They were explicit about the implication: "New investors will fully share in Google's long term economic future but will have little ability to influence its strategic decisions through their voting rights." The logic was borrowed from Buffett but applied to a company that was barely six years old and had the cultural sensibility of a graduate seminar. They wanted freedom. Freedom to invest in projects that might take years to pay off — or never pay off at all. Freedom to resist the quarterly cycle. Freedom to be weird.
"We won't 'smooth' quarterly or annual results," they wrote, quoting Buffett directly. "If earnings figures are lumpy when they reach headquarters, they will be lumpy when they reach you."
The IPO netted Brin more than $3.8 billion. The dual-class structure, controversial at the time, became the template for a generation of technology companies. By 2012, when Brin and Page issued a follow-up founders' letter introducing a third class of non-voting shares, they could point to the structure's vindication: Chrome, YouTube, Android — all products of patient, long-term investment that quarterly-focused governance might have killed in the cradle. "It took over three years just to ship our first Android handset," they noted, "and then another three years on top of that before the operating system truly reached critical mass. These kinds of investments are not for the faint-hearted."
The Discomfort of Scale
Google's expansion through the mid-2000s had the quality of a controlled explosion. The company acquired YouTube in 2006 for $1.65 billion in stock — a price that seemed extravagant at the time and, in hindsight, was one of the great bargains in the history of media. It launched Google Maps, Gmail, Android, Chrome. Each product extended the company's reach into a new dimension of digital life: communication, navigation, mobile computing, the browser itself. Brin's role in this period was less about individual product decisions than about the ethos that enabled them. He was the guardian of the culture — the man who ensured that Google's cafeterias served free food, that nursing mothers had private spaces, that new parents received home food delivery, that the company's famously open environment remained a place where dissent was not just tolerated but, in the founders' formulation, "obligated."
The darker edge of scale appeared in China. In 2006, Google agreed to comply with the Chinese government's censorship requirements — blocking sites extolling democracy, suppressing references to the Tiananmen Square demonstrations. Brin defended the decision publicly, arguing that providing some information, however restricted, was better than providing none. But the argument was plainly uncomfortable for a man whose family had fled a system that controlled information as a matter of state policy. The dissonance between Google's mission — "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" — and its accommodation of censorship was not lost on Brin, and he would later push for Google's partial withdrawal from China.
In April 2011, Brin relinquished his duties as president of technology to become director of special projects. The title change was significant: it marked a formal pivot from operating the machine to imagining what the machine could become. His interests during this period were characteristically eclectic and ambitious. Google Glass — a heads-up augmented reality display that Brin championed and wore everywhere, including on the TED stage in 2013 — was the most visible of these projects. "When we started Google 15 years ago," he told the TED audience, "my vision was that information would come to you as you need it. You wouldn't have to search query at all."
The Glass project was a commercial failure. Brin later acknowledged that he had underestimated the difficulty of consumer electronics supply chains and the challenge of achieving a reasonable price point — the devices cost $1,500. "I just didn't know anything about consumer electronic supply chains, really, and how hard it would be to build that," he said in 2025. But the failure was instructive. It revealed the gap between a technologist's vision of how humans should interact with information and the market's readiness to accept that vision. It also revealed something about Brin's risk tolerance: he would rather ship something premature and learn from the wreckage than wait for perfection.
Alphabet, or the Berkshire Hathaway of Mountain View
On August 10, 2015, Larry Page published a blog post that sent Google's stock up more than 5 percent in after-hours trading. Google would be restructured. A new holding company, Alphabet Inc., would become the parent entity. Google itself — the search engine, YouTube, Android, the advertising business — would become a subsidiary, led by a new CEO: Sundar Pichai.
Pichai — born in Madurai, India, educated at IIT Kharagpur, Stanford, and Wharton, a product leader who had been groomed through Chrome, then Android, then the role of product chief — was the operational heir. Page and Brin would run Alphabet as CEO and president, respectively, overseeing the portfolio of "Other Bets": Waymo (self-driving cars), Verily (life sciences), Calico (longevity research), Wing (drone delivery), X (the moonshot factory), and the venture arms GV and CapitalG.
The comparison to Berkshire Hathaway was explicit. Eric Schmidt later revealed that he had encouraged Page and Brin to visit Buffett in Omaha to study the holding company model. The logic was the same: strong subsidiary CEOs, operational independence, long-term capital allocation by the holding company. The difference — as analysts immediately noted — was that Berkshire's subsidiaries were essentially all profitable, whereas Alphabet's Other Bets were burning cash in pursuit of transformative but speculative technologies. "That's a very different model," observed Jan Dawson of Jackdaw Research, "and means that although Alphabet might give the CEOs of the various subsidiaries lots of operating independence, they can't be anywhere near financially independent."
Brin's role within Alphabet was, by design, less defined than it had ever been at Google. He was the president of a holding company whose subsidiaries had their own leaders. He was the co-author of the corporate structure but not the operator of its machinery. In the 2015 Alphabet founding letter, Page wrote: "Alphabet is about businesses prospering through strong leaders and independence." The sentence described a philosophy. It also described the founders' desire to step back.
The Retirement That Wasn't
Four years later, on December 3, 2019, Brin and Page published their final founders' letter. The tone was warmly valedictory, almost parental. "Today, in 2019, if the company was a person, it would be a young adult of 21 and it would be time to leave the roost," they wrote. "While it has been a tremendous privilege to be deeply involved in the day-to-day management of the company for so long, we believe it's time to assume the role of proud parents — offering advice and love, but not daily nagging!"
Pichai would become CEO of both Google and Alphabet. The founders would remain employees, board members, and controlling shareholders — the last point being the crucial one. Their supervoting shares meant that their departure from management did not diminish their power over the company's direction. They could leave the building without leaving the throne.
Brin's initial retirement was quiet. He pursued personal interests: high-tech airships, kite surfing, the study of quantum field theory. He kept an extremely low profile — no social media, no interviews, no public appearances to speak of. Then COVID arrived, the cafés closed, and the spiraling began.
The return was gradual, then total. By 2023, Brin was visiting Google's offices three to four times a week, working with AI researchers, holding weekly discussions about new papers, and — according to the Wall Street Journal — having a hand in personnel decisions, including hiring. He was instrumental in the deal that brought Noam Shazeer back from Character.AI for a reported $2.7 billion. Shazeer — a co-author of the original 2017 Transformer paper, the foundational research that underpinned ChatGPT and every other large language model — had left Google because the company had been, in Brin's own later admission, "too scared" to ship the technology.
That admission — delivered at a Stanford event in late 2025 — was bracingly specific. "I guess I would say in some ways we for sure messed up in that we underinvested and sort of didn't take it as seriously as we should have, say eight years ago when we published the transformer paper," Brin said. "We actually didn't take it all that seriously and didn't necessarily invest in scaling the compute. And also we were too scared to bring it to people because chatbots say dumb things. And you know, OpenAI ran with it, which good for them. It was a super smart insight and it was also our people like Ilya [Sutskever] who went there to do that."
The sentence contains its own indictment. Our people. The talent that built the generative AI revolution — Sutskever, Shazeer, others — had been Google's. They left because Google, the company that published the Transformer paper, did not believe enough in what it had created.
The Computer Scientist at the Frontier
By 2025, Brin had transformed from an absentee controlling shareholder into Google's most vocal internal champion of AI intensity. In February of that year, he authored an internal memo recommending that engineers working on Gemini come into the office "at least every weekday" and that 60 hours per week was the "sweet spot of productivity." The memo — from a man who had been, five years prior, sitting at home trying to study physics — was a signal of how completely the AI race had consumed his attention.
His technical engagement was genuine, not performative. "I tend to be pretty deep in the technical details," he said at Google I/O 2025, appearing alongside Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google DeepMind. Hassabis — born in London, a child chess prodigy, a neuroscientist, co-founder of DeepMind, which Google acquired in 2014 for approximately $500 million — had become the central figure in Google's AI strategy. Brin's relationship with Hassabis was symbiotic: Hassabis ran the operation; Brin provided the founder's imprimatur and the intellectual restlessness that kept pressing for more.
On the question of where AI is heading, Brin was characteristically honest about the limits of prediction. "I think we just don't know. Is there a ceiling to intelligence? ... Can it do anything a person can do? There's the question, what things can it do that a person cannot do? That's sort of a super intelligence question. And I think that's just not known, how smart can a thing be."
The candor is consistent with a pattern visible throughout his career: Brin distrusts certainty. At the World Economic Forum, he prefaced predictions about AI by saying, "You should doubt my answers a bit," and admitted that as a computer scientist trained in the 1990s, when "everybody knew AI didn't work," he had himself doubted its capabilities. This willingness to publicly register his own prior wrongness — about AI's potential, about Google's failure to scale it, about retirement — is unusual among founders of his stature.
It is also, perhaps, the through-line of his life. A boy who fled a country that insisted on false certainties — that Jews were inferior, that the state knew best, that emigration was betrayal — grew into a man who built a system for finding truth in the chaos of information, and who remained, against every incentive toward self-mythologizing, willing to say: I got it wrong.
I guess I would say in some ways we for sure messed up in that we underinvested and sort of didn't take it as seriously as we should have, say eight years ago when we published the transformer paper.
The Garage, the Graph, the Googol
There is a kind of mythology around Google's origins that the company itself has curated carefully — the garage in Menlo Park, the Lego server, the misspelling of "googol," the first Doodle (a stick figure in the logo announcing that the entire staff was at Burning Man). These details are charming and also, in their specificity, slightly misleading. They suggest that Google was born from whimsy and serendipity, that it was a happy accident of two smart kids in a fun place.
The reality is more interesting and more cold-blooded. Brin and Page's foundational insight — that the link structure of the web could be read as a massive, distributed voting system, where each hyperlink constituted a citation and citations could be weighted by the authority of the citing page — was not playful. It was rigorous. It drew on the mathematics of bibliometrics and the graph theory that had fascinated Page since his first encounter with the web's topology. The PageRank algorithm was not a hack. It was, as their seminal 1998 paper described it, an application that made "heavy use of the structure present in hypertext" to produce "much more satisfying search results than existing systems."
The paper itself — "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine" — is worth reading for the clarity of its ambition. "In this paper, we present Google, a prototype of a large-scale search engine which makes heavy use of the structure present in hypertext," they wrote. The word "prototype" is doing enormous work. By the time the paper was published, the prototype was already consuming significant Stanford computing resources. Brin's contribution — the data mining architecture that could process the web's link structure at scale — was the engine beneath the elegant conceptual framework Page had designed.
Stanford, for its part, held the patent. U.S. Patent #6,285,999, assigned to Stanford University, covered the PageRank technology. Google paid the university for the license — a transaction that has generated, over the decades, returns that Stanford's endowment managers could not have imagined.
What an Exciting Time to Be Alive
At the All-In Summit in Miami in May 2025, Brin sat down for one of his rare extended public conversations. He was loose, funny, self-deprecating — still technically on leave from Stanford's PhD program, he joked, "working on it." He described the pace of AI development in terms that revealed the depth of his astonishment: "If you skip AI news for a month, you're way behind."
He talked about using Gemini Live in his car for back-and-forth conversations, noting that the public version ran on an "ancient model" and that a "way better version" was coming. He talked about hiring — Google was bringing on people without degrees who "just figure things out on their own in some weird corner." He talked about bureaucracy, the unexpected ways that even the most advanced AI tools encountered friction when deployed inside a massive organization.
He was asked to compare the AI moment to the early internet. His answer was simple and illuminating: the early web had a "what's new" page. You could visit it and see, literally, every new website that had appeared that week. "Such and such elementary school, such and such a fish tank." The web was small enough to be surveilled by a single human being refreshing a single page. AI was not like that. AI was moving too fast for any one person to track, even — perhaps especially — the person who had built the world's most powerful tool for tracking information.
The conversation with Hassabis at Google I/O was more revealing. On the question of whether scaling — building ever-larger data centers, more powerful chips — would solve the problem of artificial general intelligence, Brin offered a surprising answer. "Historically, if you look at things like the N-body problem and simulating gravitational bodies and things like that, as you plot it, the algorithmic advances have actually beaten out the computational advances, even with Moore's law. If I had to guess, I would say the algorithmic advances are probably going to be even more significant than the computational advances."
The answer was pure Brin: grounded in mathematical history, counterintuitive, and deeply skeptical of the brute-force approach. Build the data centers, yes. But the real breakthroughs would come from ideas, not infrastructure. It was the same instinct that had produced PageRank — the conviction that an elegant algorithm could extract more signal from noise than any amount of raw computing power.
The Gift of Departure
In January 2026, Brin made his largest single charitable donation — the exact figure directed toward tackling California's housing crisis. By then, he had reportedly begun the process of relocating from California toward the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe, part of a broader movement among tech billionaires — including Larry Page — preparing to abandon the state in anticipation of a proposed wealth tax. The 2026 Billionaire Tax Act, which would impose a one-time 5% levy on residents with assets exceeding $1 billion, was projected to raise approximately $100 billion.
A California millionaire and member of Patriotic Millionaires called the founders' departure "sickening and greedy." "California has been very good to them and has supported an innovation economy that, for example, the founders of Google have benefited from," he told
Fortune. Nvidia CEO
Jensen Huang, by contrast, said leaving the state "never crossed my mind."
The juxtaposition is telling. Brin, the immigrant who fled state control, who built a company on the principle that information should be free and accessible, who described his life in America as a "gift" — this same man, faced with a new form of state imposition, began the process of departure. You can read this as hypocrisy. You can also read it as consistency: a man formed by the experience of a state that takes too much will always be alert to the taking, however different the context.
On December 7, 2025, at Stanford Engineering's centennial celebration, Brin returned to the campus where he had met Page, where they had built BackRub, where the prototype had consumed the servers and the idea had outgrown the institution. The original server — the one they had assembled from cheap parts, the one with the Lego casing — was displayed onstage. Brin sat with Stanford's president and the dean of engineering and told stories about his time as a student, about the early days, about the thing he had built and the thing it had become and the thing it was still, possibly, in the process of becoming.
He was fifty-two. He went to the Google office pretty much every day. The physics textbooks were, presumably, still on a shelf somewhere. The cafés had reopened. But Brin was not in them. He was at his desk, deep in the technical details of a technology whose limits he admitted he could not see, in a building named for a company named for a number so large it was almost a joke — a 1 followed by 100 zeros, the approximate scale of the ambition, still growing.
