The ex-wife of Google’s Sergey Brin poured divorce money into Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign and became his running mate, with potentially cataclysmic consequences.
, 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.
“I look at her and I’m like, I don’t know how these things happen,” said a person who has spent significant time with her. “It’s a crazy story.”In a race that might come down to tiny margins, Shanahan, an unknown figure to most Americans, could determine the mosthelped deliver George W. Bush the presidency by winning 97,000 votes in Florida—a state ultimately decided by fewer than 1,000 ballots.
“I just went on the internet and wrote letters to every single patent attorney in Seattle” and offered to work for free, she recounted to Steele. At night, she said, she waited tables at a sushi restaurant. Brin and Wojcicki didn’t implement a rigid custody system for their two children. They lived near each other, and the kids “would come and go” as they pleased, a person close to the situation recalled. “Nicole disrupted all that” and pushed for stricter rules, the person said. Her relationship with Wojcicki grew fraught.
In 2019, aided by a gift of more than $23 million in shares of Google’s parent company, Alphabet—courtesy of Brin—Shanahan launched a nonprofit called the Bia-Echo Foundation, with a focus on reproductive health, criminal justice reform, and environmental causes.
“At the end of the day, he's an engineer” and is often inclined to “come from a more analytical perspective than an emotional one,” said Shruti Ganguly, a filmmaker close to Shanahan, though she cautioned that she was not privy to the details of their marriage. previously described in stunning detail, in 2021, Shanahan engaged in a “brief affair” with Elon Musk—one of Brin’s close friends—at the Art Basel festival in Miami.
Shanahan tried several more times to win proprietary rights for the company’s software, fighting through a multi-year appeals and reapplication process, to no avail. Despite her own credentials as an intellectual property attorney, she brought in two successive law firms after failing pro se, only for them to come up short, too. The most recent rejection arrived last September.
He described the deal as a “pretty successful” exit, though the cash portion of the transaction was likely small, since IPwe had raised just $5 million at the time of the acquisition, according to PitchBook.Earlier this year, Shanahan and her new partner were at dinner with Kennedy and his wife, Cheryl Hines—who starred on“Both Cheryl and Bobby spin around in their chairs, and they’re looking at me, and they’re like, ‘Would you consider it’” Shanahan recounted on Steele’s podcast.
Peter Hotez, professor of pediatrics and molecular virology at Baylor College of Medicine, was also incredulous. “No physician scientist that I know of would ever claim that they're an expert on the entire category of chronic illness. That’s absurd,” he said. “And the idea that someone like Nicole Shanahan, who has no formal training in medicine or science, appoints herself an expert is just ridiculous.”have publicly rebuked RFK Jr.’s candidacy.
Joe Biden Elon Musk Robert F. Kennedy Jr. American Billionaires Sergey Brin 2024 Presidential Election Nicole Shanahan
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