“Today brings news from the Googleplex of unfortunate domestic drama,” Brad Stone reports for Businessweek. “Google co-founder Sergey Brin and his wife of six years, 23andMe co-founder Anne Wojcicki, are living separately. A person familiar with the situation calls the split difficult but ‘absolutely amicable.’ The couple has been married for six years and has two young children.”
“The news was first reported by the technology news site AllThingsD, which said Brin is now in a romantic relationship with another Google employee,” Stone reports. “The Bloomberg Billionaire Index pegs Brin’s net worth at $24.5 billion. The couple has a prenuptial agreement, so any potential divorce is unlikely to affect governance of the company.”
Stone reports, “Still, splits can be messy, especially in the small world of Silicon Valley’s elite… Wojcicki’s sister, Susan, is a senior vice president at Google and a member of Larry Page’s management team.”
Full article here.
“Brin and Wojcicki, both 40 years old, had been married for six years and have two children. They are not yet legally separated,” Liz Gannes reports for AllThingsD. “The possibility of a reconciliation of the pair is unclear, since Brin has become romantically involved with a Google employee, according to sources. This is further complicated by the fact that that employee had also at one point been involved with another Googler [see related article below].”
“While this is obviously sad and very personal news, it also has many business implications,” Gannes reports. “Brin and Wojcicki have many other well-known joint business efforts. They include Wojcicki’s personal-genomics startup 23andMe, which sells DNA test kits and helps users interpret their traits and health conditions. The company has raised more than $100 million from backers, including Google, Google Ventures and Brin himself.”
“According to the Chronicle of Philanthropy, Wojcicki and Brin gave away $223 million in 2012, the fifth-most for donors in the U.S., and they each contributed $190.1 million to their Brin Wojcicki Foundation. The foundation’s beneficiaries include the Wikimedia Foundation (Wikipedia), the Ashoka Foundation (social entrepreneurship), the Tipping Point Community (poverty in the Bay Area) and the Parkinson’s Institute,” Gannes reports. “A spokesman said Brin and Wojcicki would continue to work on all these endeavors together.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take:
I think judgment matters. If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. – Eric Schmidt
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