Sergey Brin, a co-founder of Google, has filed for divorce from his wife of four years, citing “irreconcilable disagreements” in court papers. The couple has been separated since December.
According to Insider, the world’s seventh richest man, worth $93 billion, discreetly filed for divorce from lawyer and businesswoman Nicole Shanahan in January. Papers filed by the billionaire businessman claim that details of the couple’s assets and how they will be distributed ‘are to be established.’
The 48-year-old cited “irreconcilable issues” as the basis for the breakup, stating that he and Shanahan, whom he secretly married in November 2018, have been apart since December 15.
Their divorce news comes just days after it was revealed that Brin had purchased a new home – a sprawling $13.5 million Malibu mansion once owned by popstar Pink.
Brin and Shanahan, 37, share a daughter, who was born in 2018, and the Google founder has asked to share custody of her as part of the divorce arrangements, which they are fighting to keep private out of fear that their daughter will be put at risk of ‘harassment’ or ‘kidnapping’.
However he has not asked Shanahan for child support and has requested that she do not receive any from him in the future.
According to Insider, Brin and Shanahan are intent on keeping the details of their divorce hidden from the public, with the outlet reporting that they are fighting to keep many details of the legal proceedings sealed, citing the tech mogul’s status as ‘one of the wealthiest and most famous technology entrepreneurs in the world’ as being behind the need for privacy.
The documents add that the couple fear for the safety of their daughter, who they claim could be put at risk of ‘kidnapping’ or ‘harassment’ if details of their divorce and custody battle are made public.
‘Petitioner is a co-founder of Google and one of the wealthiest and most famous technology entrepreneurs in the world,’ the outlet states the papers – which were filed by Brin’s layers – say. ‘Because of the high-profile nature of their relationship, there is likely to be significant public interest in their dissolution and child custody issues.
‘Of great concern is that such publicity puts their minor child at risk of danger, harassment, and even kidnapping, if the specifics of their day-to-day whereabouts are exposed to the public.’
The couple is paying $950 an hour for a private judge to oversee their divorce in order to keep the details confidential, according to Insider. They are also paying $300 an hour for the judge’s aide.
While private judges are more expensive, they can assist speed up divorce proceedings, which can take months, if not years, in the public court system.
Brin is familiar with this type of arrangement; in 2015, the Stanford-educated tech magnate used a private court for his first divorce from entrepreneur Anne Wojcicki, with whom he has two children.
Brin and Wojcick, who married in 2007, parted two years before their divorce was finalized when Wojcick discovered Brin’s illegal email interactions with a young Google employee named Amanda Rosenberg.
After establishing a relationship with Rosenberg in 2013, Brin moved out of the $7 million Los Altos home he had occupied with Wojcicki, the founder of the DNA testing company 23AndMe, and their two children, daughter Chloe and son Benji, according to Vanity Fair.
According to the publication, the ‘twenty-something’ Google employee was a ‘public face’ within the firm due to her involvement in the disastrous Google Glass project’s debut.
She was also said to have been a ‘friend’ of Wojcicki before beginning a relationship with the entrepreneur’s husband.
Most of the details of the former couple’s divorce remain under wraps and the Google co-founder is no doubt hoping that this will also be the case in his second marriage split.
The tech mogul began dating Shanahan in 2015 soon after his first divorce was finalized, and they secretly tied the knot on November 7, 2018, only revealing the news of their nuptials to the world in October the following year.
Brin and Shanahan went public with their relationship in 2016, when they made a glamorous debut as a couple at the Met Gala, appearing on the red carpet alongside the Google co-founder’s ex wife Wojcicki and her then-boyfriend Alex Rodriguez.
The tech baron is being represented by law firm Hanson, Crawford, Crum Family Law Group, LLP in his second divorce, while Shanahan has enlisted the services of two law firms: Spector Law Firm, APLC and Meyer, Olson, Lowy & Meyers, LLP.
Despite the secrecy surrounding the couple’s split, there is no question that Brin’s divorce will be among the most expensive in the world given his expansive personal wealth. He will join several other billionaire tech entrepreneurs on the list, including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Microsoft founder Bill Gates.
When Bezos split from his ex-wife MacKenzie Scott in 2019, he had to hand over $38 billion to her, quickly rocketing her to 22nd richest person in the world, while Gates is understood to have split his $130 billion fortune with his ex-wife Melinda when they finalized their divorce in August 2021.
It is currently unclear which assets Brin and Shanahan will be divvying up during their divorce proceedings – however property will likely play a key role in the arrangement.
In fact, news of their divorce comes just days after it was reported that the couple had purchased a $13.5 million Malibu mansion, which was once owned by chart-topper Pink, back in September 2020.
According to Dirt, Brin – who has also owned homes in Los Altos, California, and in New York – purchased the property from French investment banker Matthieu Pigasse, who bought it from Pink for $12.5 million in 2016, before flipping the property and putting it back on the market.
He is understood to have sold his New York penthouse in 2020 – 12 years after he purchased it for the relatively low sum of $8 million.
According to a listing on Zillow, Brin made a hefty profit on the Greenwich Village property, selling the three-bedroom, four-bathroom property for $12 million, two months after he is said to have snapped up Pink’s former home.
Brin and his first wife split after she reportedly discovered that he’d been having a relationship with a young Google staffer named Amanda Rosenberg (pictured)
News of Brin’s second divorce comes two and a half years after he and his Google co-founder Larry Page announced that they were stepping down from their roles as CEO and President of the website’s parent company, Alphabet.
Page and Brin started the search engine giant in 1998 three years after they met as students at Stanford University, and it went on to become one of the biggest tech companies in the world, earning the former college pals billions and skyrocketing them to the forefront of Silicon Valley’s elite.
However Shanahan also boasts her own prior business success; she was a well established Silicon Valley player before she met her soon-to-be ex-husband, having founded the patent management and valuation company ClearAccessIP in 2013.
The following year she was also named a Code X fellow at The Stanford Center for Legal Informatics.
Shanahan was a Asian Studies major at the University of Puget Sound, and after graduating attended law school at Santa Clara University
She also studied international trade at the National University of Singapore post-law school, and attended the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies just before enrolling at SCU.
In 2018, Shanahan and Brin founded the Buck Institute’s Center for Female Reproductive Longevity and Equality, after going through their own infertility struggles. Both Brin and Shanahan invested in the project, which was aimed at researching how to prevent aging women from becoming infertile.
Shanahan was told by doctors at age 29 that she had a low number of active ovarian oocytes and would unlikely be able to conceive naturally, prompting her to try IVF, which failed.