Billionaire Elon Musk has denied having an affair with the wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, as he hit out at “character assassinations” about his personal life.
Reports emerged on Sunday of an alleged fling between Musk and Nicole Shanahan in December last year, when she and Mr Brin were separated but still living together.
But Musk, the Tesla and SpaceX boss, took to Twitter on Sunday night to issue a series of denials, calling the original Wall Street Journal (WSJ) article “total bs”.
Sergey Brin is a well-known as a tech billionaire who amassed his wealth as a co-founder of Google. His estranged wife, Nicole, has also established herself as an independent legal practitioner.
Here’s everything you need to know about the couple.
Who is Sergey Brin and what is his net worth?
Sergey Brin was born on August 21, 1973, in Moscow, Russia.
Sergey is a business magnate, internet entrepreneur, and computer scientist who is well-known as the co-founder of Google with Larry Page.
Previously, Sergey was the president of Google’s parent company, Alphabet Inc, until he decided to step down from that role in December 2019.
According to Forbes, Sergey Brin has an estimated net worth of approximately $89.9billion.
Bloomberg Billionaires Index estimates his net worth to be approximately $94.6billion. The majority of Sergey Brin’s fortune is derived from a stake in Alphabet, the parent company of Google, the world’s largest search engine, according to Net Market Share.
The billionaire owns both Class B and Class C shares, giving him an aggregate stake of about 6% of the business, according to a January 2022 filing.
He also earns wealth from other businesses is has established and co-founded and co-created such as PageRank.
Who is Sergey Brin’s wife Nicole Shanahan?
Nicole Shanahan is well known for being a versatile attorney, entrepreneur, and patent professional.
She is also the founder of the Bia-Echo Foundation.
Her foundation invests in individuals that promote change in the field of innovation and provide solutions that address challenges such as reproductive equality, criminal justice reform, and a sustainable planet.
The latter issue is a personal one for Shanahan, who has been open about her difficulty getting pregnant at the launch of the Center for Female Reproductive Longevity and Equality at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging.
“Like many women who are not quite ready to start a family in their early 30s, I decided, or so I thought at the time, to take matters into my own hands and freeze embryos. However, after three failed attempts at embryo-making and three dozen visits to in vitro fertilization clinics around the Bay Area, I learned that I was not nearly as unshakable as I thought I was,” she said.
Furthermore, Nicole is an academic fellow at the Stanford Center of Legal Informatics, which is a joint center between Stanford Law School and Computer Science, where she also launched the Smart Prosecution Project.
Shanahan was previously married to a finance executive before dating Brin.
The daughter of a Chinese immigrant mother and a father who struggled with mental health issues, Shanahan told Modern Luxury magazine that she “had to figure out how the world works on my own.”
“I had two unemployed parents for the majority of my childhood, so not only was there no money, there was almost no parental guidance, and as you can imagine with a mentally ill father, there was lots of chaos and fear,” she said in the June 2021 issue.
