TFG: Sergey Brin

Billionaire Victims Club, Vol. 4

In April 2026, Sergey Brin — Google co-founder, third-richest person on Earth, net worth approximately $300 billion — sat for an interview to explain why he was fighting California's proposed wealth tax. The tax would impose a one-time 5% levy on the roughly 200 Californians whose net worth exceeds $1 billion, with the revenue earmarked for healthcare. Brin's position was that this was unacceptable. His specific framing: the tax reminded him of the socialism his family had fled when they left the Soviet Union in 1979.

Take a moment with that sentence. A man worth $300 billion is comparing a one-time 5% healthcare levy on 200 people to the system that drove his Jewish family out of Moscow. Not as a throwaway line — as a considered public argument, delivered to reporters, intended to persuade. The Soviet Union, in Brin's telling, and California's proposed tax on billionaires, are usefully comparable phenomena. He had already spent $57 million making this case through a nonprofit called Building a Better California. He had moved to Nevada. He had terminated or relocated sixty California limited liability companies to avoid the tax's retroactive clause. And he was prepared, apparently, to explain all of this with reference to Soviet anti-Semitism.

Let's talk about how this fucking guy, Sergey Brin actually got here.

I. What the State He Fled Was Actually Like

When the Brin family left Moscow in 1979, they were fleeing real and documented oppression. Soviet anti-Semitism was institutional, pervasive, and career-ending. The family's emigration was dangerous and difficult, and Brin's father, a mathematician, had been denied access to international conferences because of his religion. None of this is in dispute, and none of it is the target of this post.

What is worth examining is what the Soviet state Brin invokes was actually built on — since he's inviting the comparison. The USSR didn't just tolerate mass alcoholism. It needed it, financially. Budgetary alcohol revenues in the Soviet Union exceeded by a significant margin revenues generated by individual income taxes and social security collections. The Ministry of Finance was traditionally opposed to any anti-alcohol campaigns precisely because vodka was a major state revenue stream. When Gorbachev launched his sobriety drive in 1985, it had to be abandoned after two years, primarily because the budget collapsed without the vodka money. The average Soviet citizen was drinking seventeen litres of vodka annually. The state was, in effect, its population's dealer — not out of tolerance but out of fiscal necessity.

This is useful context because Brin now belongs to a tech class that has its own relationship with intoxication. Brin has publicly described using psilocybin mushrooms. Elon Musk uses ketamine — documented and admitted. The Silicon Valley circuit rotates annually through Burning Man, a festival in the Nevada desert that is ostensibly about radical self-expression and is operationally about doing drugs in an environment where nobody has to be at work Monday morning. The libertarian ideology running through all of it is consistent: maximum personal pharmaceutical freedom, zero government involvement, no FDA oversight of whatever is happening in that RV. Libertarians, as the line goes, are Republicans who want to smoke pot. The Soviet state was a socialist government that needed you to drink. The difference is mainly distribution.

II. The Luck Audit

Here is how Sergey Brin actually got to where he is.

His family arrived in the United States in October 1979 and received support and assistance from the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society — a Jewish nonprofit refugee resettlement organization, the kind of institution that exists because communities pool resources to help people who have nothing. His father, Mikhail, secured a faculty position at the University of Maryland through academic networks. Sergey enrolled at Maryland, graduated with honors in mathematics and computer science, and in 1993 enrolled in Stanford's PhD program on a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship — a federal grant, awarded competitively, paid for by taxpayers, specifically designed to support promising graduate students through the early years of research.

At Stanford, Brin joined Larry Page on a project funded by the NSF's Digital Library Initiative, a multi-agency federal program designed to build the infrastructure for searching large digital collections. The NSF's own account of Google's origin is unambiguous on this point: "Page was soon joined by Sergey Brin, another Stanford graduate student working on the DLI project. (Brin was supported by an NSF Graduate Student Fellowship.)" The equipment for the prototype, called BackRub, was funded by the DLI project. The computing infrastructure was Stanford's. The research environment — advisors, peer networks, server capacity, academic credibility — was Stanford's, which exists partly because of federal research funding. PageRank, the algorithm that makes Google Google, was developed there. The patent was assigned to Stanford University, not to Brin and Page. Stanford licensed it to Google.

There is also a more obscure funding trail worth knowing about. Beyond the NSF Digital Library grant, reporting has identified a separate stream of early support flowing through the intelligence community's Massive Digital Data Systems program — CIA and NSA funding directed through NSF, specifically aimed at developing technology for large-scale information retrieval and tracking. The principal investigator for this program specifically named Google as directly resulting from the research. Brin and Page's 1998 paper acknowledges both the NSF-DARPA digital library grant and DARPA support. Google has denied being funded or created by the CIA, and no one is claiming Brin worked for the intelligence community. The point is narrower: the technology that became Google was developed inside a federally funded research apparatus that included intelligence agency money flowing through academic channels. The garage in Menlo Park came after the federal grants had done their work. The garage, incidentally, belonged to Susan Wojcicki, who became Google's 16th employee and later its CEO.

The cumulative picture is not of a self-made genius who built something from nothing. It is of a highly talented immigrant who received refugee support from a nonprofit, a federal research fellowship, federal research infrastructure, and a university apparatus built on generations of public and federal investment — and who then commercialized the results at exactly the right historical moment, when the internet was exploding and venture capital was chasing anything that moved. The timing was not skill. The NSF fellowship was not self-reliance. The man comparing a healthcare tax to Soviet socialism built his $300 billion fortune substantially on public money.

III. The Tax Math

The proposed tax would cost Brin approximately $13 billion on a one-time basis — 5% of roughly $260 billion. He has spent $57 million so far fighting it. He has moved to Nevada, spending every other week at Google's Mountain View headquarters to technically maintain California residency for work while avoiding the tax's residential threshold. He has restructured sixty limited liability companies to Nevada entities. He has hired signature gatherers at $15 per signature to oppose the ballot initiative, and funded opposition political groups to run counter-campaigns.

To be clear about the arithmetic: he has spent less than half of one percent of what the tax would cost him on a campaign to avoid paying it. The $57 million figure is not a burden. It is a rounding error on a rounding error. What it represents is something more interesting than financial calculation — it is the revealed preference of a man who will spend what is to him an entirely trivial sum to avoid contributing to the public infrastructure of the state that made him, on the specific grounds that such contributions are ideologically equivalent to Soviet communism.

For context: his foundation gave $699 million in grants in 2024 and reportedly over $1 billion in 2025. To Alzheimer's research. Climate organizations. Universities. He is genuinely philanthropic at scale, on his own terms, toward causes he selects, with no democratic accountability or public input into the allocation. What he will not accept is the same money moving on society's terms rather than his. The difference between his philanthropy and the tax isn't the dollar amount. It's who decides.

IV. The Toys

This is as good a place as any to discuss the boats. Brin operates what he calls his "Fly Fleet": three superyachts named Dragonfly, Butterfly, and Firefly. The crown jewel is the new Dragonfly, a 466-foot Lürssen megayacht delivered in 2024, the largest privately owned motor yacht in America, which beats Bezos's Koru by roughly 50 feet. Bezos holds the title of largest sailing yacht; Brin simply has the bigger boat. It accommodates 24 guests across 12 staterooms, requires a 45-person crew, has two helipads, multiple swimming pools including a glass-bottomed pool, and a stern platform that folds down to create a beach-style swimming area. It costs an estimated $450 million. It was originally commissioned for a Russian gas oligarch before ownership transferred to Brin in 2024 — he bought a Russian oligarch's boat, which given his Soviet origin story has a certain irony that the piece can't resist noting.

The yacht's name, Dragonfly, is also the name of Google's internal project to build a censored search engine for China — a secret initiative that leaked in 2018 and was eventually shelved after internal employee protests and congressional scrutiny. The man comparing a 5% healthcare tax to Soviet socialism named his $450 million yacht after his company's attempt to help a communist government suppress the internet. This is not a metaphor. It is the actual name of the actual boat.

Beyond the Fly Fleet: a Gulfstream G650ER at $70 million, and for years a shared Boeing 767 "Party Plane" with Larry Page. Google famously leases hangar space at Moffett Field, the former NASA facility near Mountain View — the same Moffett Field where Brin's LTA Research operates out of Hangar Two, building a 400-foot helium-filled Zeppelin, the largest rigid airship constructed since the 1930s. It flew over the Golden Gate Bridge in October 2025, the first giant airship flight in 86 years. Sergey Brin is privately funding the return of the Zeppelin. He is also, separately, fighting a healthcare tax.

V. The Nicole Situation

No post about Sergey Brin in 2026 can responsibly omit the Nicole Shanahan arc, because it connects almost every thread in this piece to every thread in this series, and because it is the most extraordinary social document produced by Silicon Valley's billionaire class in the last five years.

Brin met Nicole Shanahan at a yoga festival at Lake Tahoe in 2014. They married in 2018. They had a daughter, Echo, who was diagnosed with autism in 2020. In 2021, the Wall Street Journal reported that the marriage ended after Shanahan had a brief affair with Elon Musk — the same Elon Musk who appears in this series as the lead entry, who had dinner with Brin in what was by all accounts a close friendship. Both Shanahan and Musk denied the affair. The Journal stood by its reporting. A subsequent New York Times investigation reported that during the marriage Shanahan had used cocaine, ketamine, and psychedelic mushrooms at Silicon Valley parties. She met her next partner — a Bitcoin software executive — at Burning Man. This is the social ecosystem in its natural habitat: yoga festivals, psychedelics, Burning Man, the world's richest men sleeping with or adjacent to each other's wives, and everyone denying everything on the record.

The divorce settlement was approximately $390 million in Alphabet shares, possibly more. Shanahan used that settlement — Google money, extracted from the fortune Brin built on federal research grants — to become the primary financial backer of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s independent presidential campaign in 2024, including his vice-presidential run alongside her. RFK Jr.'s central campaign platform included aggressive anti-vaccine advocacy. Kennedy has repeatedly claimed vaccines cause autism — a claim the scientific consensus has rejected exhaustively, based on research whose key papers were fraudulent and subsequently retracted. Shanahan's and Brin's daughter has autism. Shanahan, after consulting a neurosurgeon-turned-paleo-diet-guru who blamed the child's autism on vaccines and electromagnetic radiation, became a committed anti-vaccine voice. The divorce settlement from a man who built Google on NSF federal research grants thus became the financial engine of an anti-science presidential campaign. The public research infrastructure that produced Google's founding technology is, in this sequence, the ultimate source of funding for the movement to undermine trust in public health science.

Brin has not commented publicly on any of this.

VI. The Close

In March 2026, Sergey Brin was appointed to the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, alongside Zuckerberg, Andreessen, Ellison, Jensen Huang, and the rest of the cohort you've been reading about in this series. The panel has thirteen members. Twelve are tech executives or venture capitalists. One is a university scientist. Their combined net worth exceeds $900 billion.

The man who fled Soviet anti-Semitism with help from a refugee resettlement nonprofit, built PageRank on federal research grants, compared a healthcare tax to the system his family escaped, spent $57 million to avoid $13 billion in taxes, named his superyacht after a censored Chinese search engine, and watched his Google divorce settlement fund an anti-vaccine campaign — is now a federal science advisor. The persecution has, as usual, been wildly profitable.

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