The suburb of Los Altos, dotted with sequoia trees and apricot orchards, resembles most wealthy areas in Northern California’s Silicon Valley, with a main street of shops selling hyper-athletic offerings, like fleeces for hiking nearby mountains, and Francophile designs to decorate Provençal-influenced homes (sterling-silver trivets, champagne flutes imported from Paris). But look a bit closer and there’s something different about this particular town. A stone’s throw from the Tesla and McLaren car dealerships of Palo Alto, Los Altos has an inordinate, almost absurd number of services that cater to children. A toy store is stuffed with puffy glitter stickers and neon science projects for kid geniuses. A farm-to-fork restaurant includes a nanny-staffed room for children so you can enjoy your meal in peace, and a 5,000-square-foot kids’ science center with an electromagnetic ring toss and an exhibition about the way the wind moves on the ocean opened its doors in December.
This childhood fantasia didn’t happen by accident: some of it is the result of urban-design investments made by Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, and his wife, Anne Wojcicki (pronounced Wo-jit-skee), the most important couple in town—and perhaps the most prominent young couple in Silicon Valley. With more than $30 billion in wealth—much of it in special B-class stock that allows Brin to retain a good share of his voting power in Google—they were ranked ninth among U.S. families in charitable giving last year, on their way to becoming Generation X’s answer to Bill and Melinda Gates.
“Sergey is a beloved oddball of a guy, and unlike [Google’s current and former C.E.O.’s] Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, he’s the one who gets to do the cool stuff at Google,” says an industry observer. “He said, ‘Larry, you do the hard, prestigious work, and at the end of your life you’ll do the fun stuff, like Bill Gates. But I’m cutting out the bullshit and Davos and doing the fun stuff right now.’ ” Wojcicki, in her professional life as well as her personal one, is a powerful woman with ambitions that are enormous, which she funnels into her genetic-testing company, 23andMe. Last fall, Fast Company put her on the cover as “The Most Daring CEO in America.”
With two kids under six years old (hence the strong commitment to child-oriented activities in their town, even if the enterprise seems a bit Truman Show-like), the couple were widely seen as perfect for each other. Some people even called them “twins”: they’re the same age (40), went to elite universities, and are fanatical about the outdoors, yoga, and athletics. Brin likes springboard diving; Wojcicki rides an elliptical bike to work. Among the foremost examples of Silicon Valley’s data-driven pragmatism and optimism, they fervently believe the world can be a better place and have devoted themselves to making it so through their many interlocking ventures and family foundation, to which they contributed $187 million last year.
But romantic scandals can happen even to those for whom “good fortune arrives in fairytale-like flurries,” as The New York Times once wrote. The pair separated about 10 months ago. Last year Brin, a handsome, compact man with a toned physique, an enviable head of hair, and sparkling brown eyes, left the family’s spread on a $7 million Los Altos lot while dating a Google employee in her mid-20s, Amanda Rosenberg—who, in turn, ditched her boyfriend, then a prized executive at Google’s Android arm, for Brin. Gossip about the situation ricocheted quickly among the upper echelons of the wealthy fortysomethings leading Silicon Valley. Making things even more complicated, Wojcicki, says a friend of the couple’s, considered Rosenberg “a friend.”
A stunning Englishwoman with Chinese and Jewish roots, Rosenberg often dyes her long dark hair with streaks of color, like burnt sienna. She has a comedian’s sense of timing and a propensity for sharing her emotions widely on social media. She went to the same boarding school as the Duchess of Cambridge and Princess Eugenie. At Google she quickly moved up the ranks to become a marketing manager or main “cheerleader,” as an industry observer called her, for Google Glass. Rosenberg was a “public persona” within Google, says a co-worker, and sought a “path for attention” rather than focusing on being collegial within her department.
“Glass” is the shorthand for the computerized spectacles Brin began rolling out last year. When the wearer says, “O.K., Glass,” the glasses leap into action, performing most of the functions of a smartphone—checking e-mail, uploading photos to social media, and, in what’s perhaps its most bizarre trick, taking videos of the world from the viewpoint of the wearer’s eyes. Rosenberg came up with the command “O.K., Glass” and has modeled the product at events and on social media. Though not as high-profile as Brin, she has provided a human face—an attractive, young, female face—to Glass, much the way Scarlett Johansson’s voice, in Spike Jonze’s film Her, is the human interface of a computer operating system so charming and sympathetic that a man falls in love with it.
Slim and attractive, Wojcicki is currently living on her own, trying to manage the children while engaged in a serious battle over saving 23andMe, which has come under fire from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Rosenberg is wrestling with an even more pernicious demon: depression.
I.T. Couple
Brin’s and Wojcicki’s orbits collided in 1998, when Brin, a graduate student in Stanford’s computer-science department, moved off campus with classmate Larry Page to set up a search-engine company in Wojcicki’s sister Susan’s garage. Susan, who met Brin when he dated a friend of hers, charged them $1,700 a month rent to offset her mortgage (she is now the most senior female employee at Google, and the new head of YouTube). Brin and Page filled the garage with desks made of old pine doors set on sawhorses, a turquoise shag carpet, and a Ping-Pong table. Their search engine, initially called “BackRub,” evaluated the incoming links on a page instead of keywords, as their competitors did, as well as the importance of the entity doing the linking. (In search, as in life, it’s about who you know.)
Brin’s parents, a pair of Russian-Jewish scientists from Moscow, had experienced prejudice in their home country, and migrated when he was six years old with help from the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (a charity to which Brin gave $1 million in 2009, and where his mother, Eugenia, serves on the board). The scientific community outside of Washington, D.C., embraced his parents, though money was still an issue, instilling a sense of frugality in their son.
The Wojcickis were similarly tight-knit and academic—and, like the Brins, also thrifty and non-materialistic. Wojcicki’s father was the chairman of Stanford’s physics department, and her mother is a journalism teacher. A lightly tanned brunette who was high-energy, athletic, and popular in school—a sort of Jennifer Aniston in Birkenstocks—Wojcicki figure-skated as a child and played ice hockey at Yale, where she majored in biology. After graduation she worked as a health-care investment analyst on Wall Street for 10 years. Her parents weren’t entirely pleased. “It was always embarrassing to come home,” she has said. “People were like, ‘Oh, Anne, you Wall Street girl.’ ” (Neither Brin nor Wojcicki responded to questions from Vanity Fair.)
In Brin, Wojcicki found another child of baby-boomer academics who could see beyond academia’s cautious, elitist approach to discovering new knowledge, a slow process in which researchers propose a hypothesis, organize an experiment to collect data, submit findings to peer review, and finally, many months later, gain publication in an esoteric journal. Brin and Wojcicki are pioneers of a different model, with enormous potential in both its reach and its speed: they look to advanced, Web-based tools and large data sets as the key to solving problems, from how to target advertising to discovering the drugs to treat cancer. Hypotheses can be limiting and scientists can be led astray; using massive computing power to find patterns is quick, and data sets don’t lie.
As Wojcicki and Brin started seeing each other, Google had not only weathered the dot-com crash but begun to dominate the search-engine business and was minting money via AdWords, the most effective advertising platform in history. Eventually, Google would employ 55,000 people on its 65-building campus in Mountain View, California, creating the country’s best e-mail platform (Gmail), their own browser (Chrome), a G.P.S. mapping system (Google Maps), a news aggregator (Google News), the world’s largest collection of data-storage servers, and the world’s most popular mobile operating system (Android). Google became a supremely powerful corporation, but in its DNA it remained anti-corporate. While it acted aggressively to innovate, Brin and Page tried as hard as possible to hew to their unofficial motto of “Don’t be evil,” keeping their search engine pure despite attempts by major advertisers to game results. When Google, in a rare misstep, censored its results in China, Brin, whose parents’ experience attuned him to the abuses of totalitarian regimes, took the leading role in pulling the company out of the country.
The corporate culture that you’ve likely heard about at Google—the lack of a dress code, the free sushi, the pets at work, the free Pilates sessions—was all part of the founders’ mission to create a benevolent workplace. When investors leaned on Page and Brin to hire an established C.E.O.—what’s called “adult supervision” in the Valley—they selected Eric Schmidt, a computer scientist and manager who was known to attend Burning Man, the annual, costumed bacchanal and creativity free-for-all in the Nevada desert that’s a tradition among Google executives. “Larry and Sergey genuinely care about innovation, and part of that means genuinely caring about employees so they do the best and most creative work they can do,” says a former Googler.
Creativity meant thinking about things differently from the way other corporations did, and it’s part of how Google stays on top. It also meant that when Brin got married it wouldn’t be in the traditional way. In 2007 he and Wojcicki invited guests to a secret location in the Bahamas. Wojcicki hadn’t always wanted to get hitched—during her years on the Street she saw bankers cheating on their wives, according to the friend of the couple’s—but Brin was her man. For the wedding, she wore a white bathing suit, and the groom a black one. They swam out to a sandbar to take their vows surrounded by the ocean.
A year later, Wojcicki gave birth to their first child just as Google executives started enjoying life as some of the richest people in the world. Schmidt was a pilot, and, according to the friend, he encouraged other Google executives to indulge their desires for yachts and planes. Brin, Page, and Schmidt purchased at least a half-dozen planes, including a 767 and a 757; they basically “own an airline,” says the friend. Brin also purchased a home in New York City’s West Village. Schmidt bought Ellen DeGeneres’s $20 million Montecito mansion, a $15 million New York apartment, which made an appearance as Shia LaBeouf’s pad in the film Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, and, recently, a $22 million home near the Playboy Mansion, in Holmby Hills.
Schmidt’s wife, Wendy, however, retreated to their compound on Nantucket and didn’t often make the Google social scene. Schmidt, now 58, was sometimes accompanied by younger women, one of whom briefly worked at Google.
Several former Google employees say that the company is casual in its approach to dating at work. One says that Google is “intentionally agnostic about dating,” and that there are hundreds of “Google couples” among its global offices. In fact, Google’s code of conduct does not ban dating between employees, saying, “Romantic relationships between co-workers can, depending on the work roles and respective positions of the co-workers involved, create an actual or apparent conflict of interest. If a romantic relationship does create an actual or apparent conflict, it may require changes to work arrangements or even the termination of employment of either or both individuals involved.”
Concerning the culture of office romances at Google, one Atherton socialite with close connections to the company says, “When you have executives dating employees, it’s like a doctor-nurse relationship—it’s not illegal, but it seems like it shouldn’t be happening. Tech is a man’s world. Most of these guys are married, and then there are these young fresh [female] sharks, and they’re smart too.” But the men have hundreds of millions of dollars. The socialite trots out an old saw: “It’s almost like you get a Stanford degree so you can work at Google, so you can find a husband.”
Over the years, there have been several notable workplace romances at the top levels of Google, including one between Page and Marissa Mayer, now the C.E.O. of Yahoo. There were hallway discussions about the two of them dating, and some believed being close to Mayer was helpful when trying to quickly secure Page’s approval for a project.
Wojcicki, unlike many wives of rich men, wasn’t enthusiastic about collecting art or jewelry, and she argued against buying planes and boats, says the friend of the couple’s. Some say she can be headstrong and withholding of praise, hot to her own ideas and dismissive of others’. Wojcicki is adamant about wanting a “normalized” life, says a source close to her, using the Silicon Valley billionaires’ phrase for “normal.” But there’s nothing normal about the astronomical wealth, or the power that comes from being the ones changing the world.
In 2006, Wojcicki co-founded 23andMe and soon raised several rounds of financing, including $6.5 million from Google. She hoped to attract over a million customers to her company, coaxing them to spit into a tube and send the saliva to her DNA-genotyping lab for today’s low price of $99. Her mission was to pass along as much information as possible about each person’s health and ancestry, on the principle that this knowledge, by rights, is ours. But not everyone receives good news; many have learned about elevated levels of risk for breast cancer, Alzheimer’s, or Parkinson’s. Some health-care professionals believe it is unwise to give individuals such daunting news without the support of personal counseling.
Wojcicki, it turns out, had a more personal stake in her business than one might imagine. Brin’s great-aunt suffered from Parkinson’s, the neuro-degenerative disorder, and his mother was diagnosed with it in 1999. It was long thought that Parkinson’s was not hereditary. But beginning in 2004, researchers suggested that people with a certain gene mutation (more common among Ashkenazi Jews) have a risk of between 30 and 75 percent of succumbing to the disease. (The general population’s risk is about 1 percent.) When Wojcicki tested Brin, his results were positive for the mutation. Brin read the risk as possibly having only about 10 good years left, says the friend of the couple’s.
After getting such news, some of us would curl up into a ball, but Brin didn’t. Unlike Steve Jobs, who fiercely guarded news about his health, Brin started a blog and announced his results publicly, at Google’s Zeitgeist conference in 2008 in Mountain View. Brin began exercising even more relentlessly than usual, and drinking coffee, which some doctors recommend for those at risk for the disease, even though he abhorred the taste. (He eventually switched to green tea.) He told Wired magazine that he hoped those steps might reduce his risk by half, and if research on the brain progresses, as he believes it will, his risk could be cut in half again.
In addition, Wojcicki and Brin have the means to aid such research, and they have given more than $150 million to the Michael J. Fox Foundation and $7 million to the Parkinson’s Institute. They have also donated to the Breakthrough Prizes, one of which was awarded to a Parkinson’s researcher at a ceremony at the NASA Ames Research Center, in Mountain View, last fall co-hosted by Vanity Fair. Research on the 10,000 Parkinson’s sufferers that Wojcicki has recruited at 23andMe, the largest cohort of these genotypes in the world, might cut Brin’s risk even more. “Somewhere under 10 percent” is his own assessment.
A New Life
In the years following his genetic test, Brin shifted his focus at Google. Like many leaders in Silicon Valley, he had grown bored with quotidian problems and started to dream more about things that were literally out of this world, like space travel and robots who will become our friends. As Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen invested $200 million on a superplane that can launch a rocket, and Tesla’s Elon Musk talked about the Hyperloop, Brin, working at a company with the country’s top engineers, threw his energy into Google X, the company’s “secret lab,” in two nondescript buildings near the Mountain View campus.
In 2012, to debut Google Glass, Brin coordinated a skydiving stunt, with a team of jumpers leaping out of a zeppelin over downtown San Francisco. The media was enthralled: Brin, they said, was the real-life Tony Stark, the comic-book genius innovator played by Robert Downey Jr. in the Iron Man films. (Actually, director Jon Favreau says Musk was his inspiration.) Glass was Brin’s first big project at X; now he’s ready to turn his attention to driverless cars, beta versions of which are crisscrossing San Francisco today, like so many ghosts.
The first incarnation of Glass, a 10-pound, head-mounted display attached to cables that looped to a box on the user’s belt, was not sexy, but Brin had it redesigned as sleek, lensless frames in shades of “cotton,” “tangerine,” and “sky.” Still, they screamed “nerd.” At an Allen & Co. conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, Brin and Wojcicki approached designer Diane von Furstenberg with an idea: perhaps she would like to collaborate. The designer was tickled by the notion of her models wearing Glass at a fashion show. It would lend a bit of tech gloss to her company, and fashion glamour for Glass.
For the event the Glass team, including Amanda Rosenberg, descended on New York to collaborate with von Furstenberg’s studio. Brin and Wojcicki threw a party at their home in the West Village and Glass’s palette was matched to von Furstenberg’s clothes. On the day of the show, during New York’s Fashion Week, Rosenberg posed with von Furstenberg and Brin for celebratory photos. She posted a picture of herself sitting in the front row, using Glass to record the show. “You can see that everyone looks pretty cool, whereas I can barely contain my excitement,” Rosenberg wrote, with her usual sense of self-deprecating humor.
While Glass was blowing up in the press, a friend admits, Wojcicki may have been a bit hard on Brin. “Anne is great, but she can be difficult,” says the friend. “She’s hard on Sergey, and she doesn’t let him get away with things.” She was focused on saving him: when research discovered that a gene variant might protect those with Brin’s rare Parkinson’s-related mutation, Wojcicki patented it. (Like many of her business decisions, patenting genes—a move often seen as an attempt to corner a drug market—is controversial in the medical establishment.)
Wojcicki still wanted a normal life, or as normal as she could have: to be a dedicated mom and for the family to have dinner together. But “instead of just being a Google founder, Sergey was suddenly awesome, a cool person, a performer—a celebrity!” says the friend of the couple’s. “And he was like, ‘Wait a second—I’m doing all this cool stuff, and then I have to come home and change diapers?’ ”
Wojcicki began to help Brin informally on Google Glass, says the friend. Rosenberg wanted to get the product into the hands of moms, so she came over to Wojcicki’s home to discuss reaching out to the many kid-oriented services in Los Altos. At the time, Rosenberg’s boyfriend was Hugo Barra, a high-ranking executive on Google’s Android team. A Brazilian educated at M.I.T., he was essentially the face of their new mini-tablet, the Nexus 7, and a well-regarded, creative product manager. Rosenberg posted internal videos of the two of them together and was “so proud when she started dating him,” says a co-worker. Over the holiday season in 2012–13, says the couple’s friend, Wojcicki and Rosenberg became close enough that Wojcicki bought Rosenberg a Christmas present. The two of them went to a birthday dinner for Russian investor Yuri Milner, with Barra, Brin, and both Wojcicki’s and Brin’s parents. Rosenberg was smoking cigarettes, and Barra wanted her to stop. Wojcicki lectured her about the health risks.
Around that time, according to the friend, Wojcicki came across messages between Rosenberg and Brin that caused her to feel alarm, and she mentioned her concern to Rosenberg. (Rosenberg declined to comment for this article.) A few months later, in April, Brin moved out of their estate in Los Altos and into another home that they own nearby. He and Wojcicki maintained a cordial relationship.
Wojcicki must have wondered at the way a partnership built on love, pragmatism, and a shared philosophy about the way the world works can be trumped by the passion and excitement of a new relationship.
This wasn’t the outcome Wojcicki had desired for her marriage, but she could live with it. However, something odd was happening: Rosenberg was not leaving Barra. They were still dating while she was also seeing Brin. Allegedly, Page and Schmidt were aware of this.
At this point, says a source close to the situation, Barra was making plans to move abroad with Rosenberg. He had attracted a competing job offer from a fast-growing Chinese mobile-phone maker, Xiaomi (pronounced *Shao-*me), to take their business international. Though Google can throw a lot of money at an employee to keep him, Barra was seriously considering taking the job in China. Still ignorant of his girlfriend’s relationship with Brin, Barra discussed planting roots in Hong Kong with her. But in late May, according to the source, Rosenberg told Barra that they needed to break up, though she did not tell him the reason.
A few months later, Brin and Wojcicki began to discuss acknowledging their separation in the press. With so many divergent agendas, this process became messy. Wojcicki, in particular, was starting to feel uncomfortable when acquaintances at conferences would send their regards to Brin via her, without realizing they were no longer together. According to the friend of the couple’s, Brin wanted to go public with the news before Burning Man, which takes place at the end of August, because he hoped to attend the festival with Rosenberg.
On August 23, The New York Times ran a story entitled “Women at Google Looking Past the Glass Ceiling,” for which a business reporter was given access to women on the Glass team at a luau-style lunch at the company. “If high fashion and high tech are worlds apart,” she wrote, “the women of Google Glass are like explorers, trying to connect the two.” One conspicuous female team member, Rosenberg, was not mentioned. Around the same time, according to sources, she removed many photographs from her Facebook and Google+ pages, including ones that showed her with Barra.
News of the Wojcicki-Brin split finally broke on August 28, quickly followed by online speculation about Brin’s relationship with Rosenberg. “It was inappropriate,” says the source close to the situation, of the relationship. “Larry is so ethically strict. . . . I heard Larry was insanely upset by this whole situation and wasn’t talking to Sergey” for a time. The source adds that Brin and Rosenberg both remained at Google X. “At Google, some people were furious internally, especially women, that Sergey and Amanda were not [professionally] separated.” (Google would not comment for this article.)
That same day, August 28, Google revealed that Barra was leaving the company to take the job at Xiaomi, earlier than he had planned to make the announcement. To some, it seemed too much of a coincidence: online news sites were soon abuzz with speculation about Brin’s relationship with Rosenberg.
Barra was advised not to talk publicly about his departure from Google, leaving room for the press to conjecture that he was possibly pushed out of the company. “In China, so much for executives is about your image, and in one day Hugo’s value got cut in half,” says the friend of Brin and Wojcicki’s. Instead of Xiaomi regarding Barra as a top guy who was recruited from Google, now there were questions about whether he had been pushed out by the founder of Google for personal reasons. (This notion proved short-lived, and Barra’s public persona ultimately received a lift from the chatter.) While all this was playing out, Wojcicki took off for Fiji with some girlfriends to get some space, doing yoga while bobbing on the sea.
If this was the entirety of the behind-the-scenes theatrics of Brin and Wojcicki’s relationship, it might make a good Lifetime movie, but there was another, and sadder, act to come. Brin likes his newfound freedom, says the friend of the couple’s, but he also likes being close to his wife and children. “He thinks his life is great now.” Brin attended Marissa Mayer’s annual extravagant Halloween party with Wojcicki and the kids. This didn’t sit well with Rosenberg, says the family friend—“the two of them have horrible, screaming fights. It’s part of the passion, the chemical attraction.”
A couple of months ago, Rosenberg ran into a rough patch. As she wrote in an essay that she posted on her Tumblr blog, “I suffer from clinical depression. Whilst I’m not proud of it, I’m not ashamed of it either.” She called depression a “sneaky bugger,” adding, “You might seem happy on the outside. Smiling, talking to people at parties, saying things like Did you put lime in this hummus? It’s delicious, my face is having such a great time! But you, and others around you, may not realize how deeply the depression runs.”
Turns out, she continues, that she was “a ticking time bomb. See, when you extreme hoard all the feelings (like finding-a-dead-pet-under-the-refrigerator kind of hoarding), you end up with none at all. . . . I’m in treatment and have been for 6 weeks. Reaching out for help is the single best and bravest decision I have ever made.”
In Silicon Valley, the tale of this love rectangle has been interpreted in various ways. To some young wives of tech billionaires, it’s about locking arms to support a clan member, declaring that they won’t stand for the same treatment. To other observers, it’s a parable about the perils of an atmosphere perhaps too casual about office dating. And to yet others, it’s about the danger inherent in data sets, when the data includes too much information about one’s mortality. If Brin had never learned about his Parkinson’s risk, he might never have had what a friend of the couple’s characterizes as an emotional crisis and strayed from his wife. (But had Wojcicki not helped him discover his risk for contracting the disease, he might not have enacted the healthy lifestyle choices that may prolong his life.)
Rosenberg continues to work at Google X. Brin does too, overseeing new projects such as flying wind turbines that circle one thousand feet overhead, fixed to a tether, and, rumor has it, broadband transmitters located on high-altitude balloons. He is on the Paleo Diet now—he’s like “a hunter-gatherer,” says the friend of the couple’s.
Wojcicki is said to be dealing with the separation well, though she has been distracted by enormous problems at her company—the F.D.A. shut down part of 23andMe’s operations in late November, forcing the company to stop providing health-related test results to its customers. Some powerful players, like the American Medical Association, are demanding that she loop in physicians. Many of Wojcicki’s competitors, feeling the heat, have agreed to do so, but she has refused.
According to people who know her, she doesn’t want a divorce. Though the couple has a pre-nup, there’s more than enough money to go around, and she wouldn’t want to deal with courts and custody battles. She still owns the patent that might be the key to creating a drug to treat Brin.
For his part, Barra recently even made a kind gesture toward Rosenberg and reposted her essay about depression on his own social-media page. “Good to see you’re the better man, taking the high road here. Water under the bridge, man,” wrote a member of his Google+ circle. Rosenberg continues to be active on social media. Her friends and followers piped up recently when she dyed her hair blond. “That’s going to cause a double take,” one of her friends wrote. Another added, “Beautiful as always.”
