Who is Sundar Pichai, the new CEO of both Google and Alphabet?

He is a billionaire

Sergey Brin, 46, is now valued at an estimated US$56.8 billion, according to Forbes. But he comes from more humble beginnings.

Brin was born in the Soviet Union during the summer of 1973. His father dreamed of being an astrophysicist, but his Jewish background and USSR’s anti-Semitism kept him from those ambitions. Instead, he ended up working as an economist for a government planning agency and crunching numbers for Soviet propaganda.

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The family managed to get exit visas and flee the USSR when Brin was six. However, his family’s stressful, troubled experience left the Google co-founder with a lasting appreciation for democracy and freedom.

The Brin family ended up in Maryland, where the Google co-founder was enrolled in a Montessori school that emphasised independence and fostering creativity. Later on, Brin would discover that his Google co-founder, Larry Page, had also gone to a Montessori school.

Brin didn’t revisit Moscow until he was 17, during a class trip led by his father. “Thank you for taking us all out of Russia,” Brin told his dad. Spurred by a blossoming defiant streak, he threw pebbles at a police car, and almost got in serious trouble when the officers inside noticed.

Brin eventually earned his bachelor’s degree in mathematics and computer science at the University of Maryland, and then flew west to Stanford to get his Ph.D. in computer science. There, his love of high-adrenaline exercise flourished: he tried out skating, skiing, gymnastics and even the trapeze.

Brin’s resume from back in 1996, as he was working toward his Ph.D. at Stanford, is still available online. Before Google, Brin was more focused on making an algorithm for personalised film recommendations, or finding a way to automatically detect cases of copyright infringement.

How he met Larry Page

Brin met Google co-founder Larry Page at Stanford in 1995. The two reportedly found each other “obnoxious” at first, but they later became classmates and close friends who geeked out about computer science.

Brin and Page started collaborating in 1996 on a search engine they initially called BackRub. They registered the domain Google.com in September 1997 with the mission to organise the world’s information, and dropped out of Stanford the following year to work on their search engine. The rest, as we now know, is history.

Burning Man is a way of life

The founders created the first Google Doodle ever in 1998 to let people know they weren’t around to do damage control if the site was broken The reason? They were at Burning Man, the freewheeling art festival in the middle of the Nevada desert.

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Both Brin and Page are “burners”, meaning they’re devout fans and attendees of Burning Man. When it came around to hiring an outside CEO for Google, they approved the hire of Eric Schmidt in 2001 after learning he had attended the festival. They then brought him to Burning Man with them to “see how he would do”.

He is an ambitious creator

As Google ballooned from simply a search engine to a huge company with dozens of diverse projects, Brin has been the mastermind behind some of the most ambitious ones as one-time head of X, the company’s moonshot factory. His projects included self-driving cars, smart contact lenses and smart glasses.

For a long time, you couldn’t spot Brin without the computerised Google Glass smart glasses. The New York Times reported Brin may have played a big role in the product’s rocky launch in 2012, rushing it into the world before it was ready for public scrutiny.

Brin also worked on Google’s now-dismantled social network, Google+. He admitted on stage in 2014 that he should have never worked on it because he’s “kind of a weirdo” and not very sociable. “It was probably a mistake for me to be working on anything tangentially related to social to begin with,” Brin said.

He is obsessed with fitness

Even as Google has grown into a multibillion-dollar company, Brin has stood by his fitness obsession roots. He’s known to typically wear workout clothes and Vibram barefoot shoes, and he was frequently seen zipping around the office on roller blades, doing yoga stretches during meetings or walking around on his hands for fun.

Brin also has a wild sense of humour. “He conducted job interviews once dressed as a cow,” early Google employee Douglas Edwards told Fast Company. As an April Fools’ joke, Brin once told pregnant Google employees that he would be offering birthing classes.

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However, a 2018 book also said Brin was known as “the Google playboy” during the company’s early days. “He was known for getting his fingers caught in the cookie jar with employees that worked for the company in the masseuse room,” a former employee said. “He got around.”

He’s brilliant

Those who have known Brin attest to the fact that he truly does believe in using knowledge and power for the greater good. The Economist once called him the “Enlightenment Man,” for his dedication to using reason and science to solve huge world problems.

“Obviously everyone wants to be successful, but I want to be looked back on as being very innovative, very trusted and ethical,” Brin has said. “And ultimately making a big difference in the world.”

He was married

Meanwhile, Brin got married in 2007 to Anne Wojcicki, the CEO of genetics company 23andMe and the sister of early Google employee (and now YouTube CEO) Susan Wojcicki. For the wedding, the couple invited guests to a secret location in the Bahamas and wore bathing suits for the ceremony – which took place on a sandbar.

The couple donated hundreds of millions of dollars to charity, including at least US$160 million to Parkinson’s research. The neurodegenerative disease runs in Brin’s family (both his great aunt and mother had it) and a test through 23andMe – Wojcicki’s company – revealed that Brin has a genetic mutation that makes him predisposed.

To lower his chances of getting Parkinson’s, Brin started exercising even more intensely and drinking green tea twice a day. Because of his health regimen and scientific progress, he estimated in 2010 that he now has only a less than 10 per cent chance of getting the disease.

However, Brin’s marriage to Wojcicki hit the rocks in 2013, and the couple separated. The couple officially finalised their divorce in June 2015 after eight years of marriage.

It later came out around the time of his separation in 2013, Brin started an affair with a Google employee named Amanda Rosenberg, who was also in a relationship with another high-level Google executive at the same time.

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He has expensive toys and real estate

In the more than 20 years since founding Google, Brin and Page have accumulated a great deal of dispensable income. In 2005, they bought a 50-person plane together. Brin also owns a superyacht, which he bought back in 2011 for US$80 million.

Brin owns real estate in both New York City and Los Altos, California. He’s invested quite a bit of money in Los Altos through a real estate investment firm called Passerelle Investment Co., which has helped family-run, kid-friendly stores and cafes spring up or stay in business.

As of 2015, Brin employed at least 47 people to manage his personal affairs – including a yacht captain, personal shopper, and a former Navy SEAL – through a company called Bayshore Global Management.

Brin’s position at Google got a massive upgrade in August 2015, when Google became a subsidiary of a parent company named Alphabet. Brin transitioned from “director of special projects” at X to become the president of Alphabet.

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Where he is today

Nowadays, Brin is linked to the founder of a legal tech start-up named Nicole Shanahan. The couple has been linked together since 2015 – that same year Brin officially divorced Wojcicki – although they didn’t make their first public appearance until a year later.

The couple has a baby girl together who was reportedly born in late 2018. It was recently reported that Brin and Shanahan secretly got married sometime last year, although the couple hasn’t confirmed it.

On Tuesday, Brin and Page announced in a joint statement they were stepping down from their respective roles at Alphabet. “We’ve never been ones to hold on to management roles when we think there’s a better way to run the company,” they wrote.

Brin will remain a member of Alphabet’s board of directors, and he still has controlling voting shares at the company. There’s no word on who will replace Brin as Alphabet’s president, or if the position will be eliminated as Sundar Pichai becomes CEO of both Google and Alphabet.

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