Is Nicole Shanahan the Most Dangerous Woman in America?
When Google co-founder Sergey Brin began openly dating Nicole Shanahan, in 2015, some members of his circle assumed it was a fling. Fresh out of law school, she was 12 years his junior, with few of the qualifications that might level the power dynamic with the world’s seventh-richest man. “I thought, okay, she’s fine,” a person close to the situation told The Daily Beast. “And then it went on.”
By the time they married, in 2018, Shanahan had slingshotted into Silicon Valley stardom. She socialized with other billionaires’ plus-ones, distributed millions to pet causes—sometimes igniting controversy—and worked to distance Brin from his ex-wife, 23andMe co-founder Anne Wojcicki, who had remained close with the billionaire, according to multiple sources with knowledge of the relationships.
But almost as quickly, Shanahan’s marriage to Brin deteriorated. The couple squabbled over the right approach to raising their daughter, who was diagnosed with autism, and Shanahan chafed at Brin’s left-brain thinking. There was also the matter of her alleged affair with Elon Musk in 2021, a betrayal so profound and astonishing that the starchy pages of The Wall Street Journal might briefly have been confused for a tabloid.