It was a holiday party at the Marin County headquarters of the crypto titans, and Sergey Brin had his pick of Gavin Newsom.
Mr. Brin, co-founder of Google and one of the the richest people in the worldhe is a longtime friend of Mr. Newsom, the governor of California. Both men attended each other’s weddings. But now Mr. Brin pulled Mr. Newsom aside to another part of the property for a serious talk.
Mr. Brin told Mr. Newsom that he could not stand the state’s proposed billionaire tax. They were soon joined by Mr. Brin’s girlfriend, Gerelyn Gilbert-Soto, a Trump-loving gut health influencer. While she tried to defuse tensions — she joked that she would let Mr. Newsom’s bad policies slide because he was handsome — she argued that the measure would destroy California’s economy.
Mr. Newsom, who never seemed interested in supporting the tax, came out the next month vowing to defeat it. He declined to comment on the interaction.
The December confrontation, which took place at a party hosted by billionaire Chris Larsen and was described by three people briefed on it, reflected Mr. Brin’s new bellicose posture. He is increasingly politically restless, more willing to spend his estimated $273 billion fortune on elections, and evidently more receptive to Republican views.
Mr. Brin, 52, has long had no interest in politics. When he did, he embraced liberal causes: he donated to the California same-sex marriage campaign in 2008 and supported President Barack Obama’s re-election bid in 2012. He called President Trump’s 2016 election “deeply offensive” leaked comments to Google employees and then joined a protest against Mr. Trump’s ban on immigrants from several predominantly Muslim countries. In 2021, he quietly founded a nonprofit group that has spent at least $88 million on climate and environmental policy.
But now, like many other leaders in the traditionally liberal bastion of Silicon Valley, Mr. Brin has moved to the right.
With his outspoken conservative girlfriend by his side, he has joined the ranks of tech executives courting Mr Trump in his second term. Last May, he attended a fundraiser with Vice President JD Vance and donated nearly half a million dollars to the Republican National Committee. In September, he told the president at a White House dinner that he was “very grateful” for the administration’s support for tech companies. He was appointed in March this year White House Technical Council and donated to the Republican candidate for governor of California, who has since earned Mr. Trump’s endorsement.
Mr. Brin is particularly appalled by the proposal for a one-time five percent tax on California billionaires and has emerged as a leading opponent of the measure in Silicon Valley. To avoid the tax, he moved to the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe before the Dec. 31 deadline (he now spends every other week at Google’s California headquarters, alternating with Nevada, a person familiar with the arrangement said). And he spent $57 million to try to undermine the measure, including an additional $9 million that was disclosed Friday.
Asked to comment on this article, Mr. Brin said in a rare statement: “I fled socialism with my family in 1979 and I know the devastating, oppressive society he created in the Soviet Union. I don’t want California to end up in the same place.”
The New York Times spoke to more than a dozen people close to Mr. Brin for this story, many of whom were granted anonymity to describe private conversations.
Mr. Brin’s spending, along with smaller donations in the California gubernatorial race, made him the state’s second-biggest individual donor this election cycle — behind billionaire Tom Steyer, who is himself running for governor.
“This is a guy who is not a fan,” said Marty Wilson, the longtime political chief of the California Chamber of Commerce, who spoke to Mr. Brin’s advisers. “He’s very serious and it’s not just a hobby for him. He’s going to play big time.”
A girlfriend who is a huge Trump fan
Mr. Brin’s political involvement roughly coincided with his relationship with Ms. Gilbert-Soto, which began in 2023. Mr. Brin began dating her after his divorce from Nicole Shanahan, who served as Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s running mate in 2024.
Ms. Gilbert-Soto, 32, who goes by GG, he describes himself on Instagram as a “holistic health coach” and “clean meat enthusiast.” She, like Mr. Brin, regularly attends the Burning Man festival and appeared on a season of the reality television series “Vanderpump Rules.”
But in Trumpworld, she also styles herself as a fiery brand, and her loyalty baffles even some of the president’s own aides. She called Mr. Trump her “bestie,” owned a clutch emblazoned with “MAGA,” and flaunted a photo of Mr. Brin wearing a red MAGA hat, two people who saw it said. After comedian Seth Rogen made an anti-Trump joke at an event last year, Ms. Gilbert-Soto became incensed and complained to other guests, one attendee said. She declined an interview request.
Ms. Gilbert-Soto’s ability to work her way into rooms with powerful people and her influence over Mr. Brin amused some of his peers in Silicon Valley and inside Google (she remains on the board of its parent company, Alphabet).
In December, she accompanied Mr. Brin to Florida to meet with conservative podcaster Ben Shapiro at his studio. She traveled with him several times to see Mr. Trump at Mar-a-Lago or The White House — and described their visits profusely on social media.
During the presidential transition, Ms. Gilbert-Soto attended an intimate dinner for four at Mar-a-Lago with Mr. Trump, Mr. Brin and Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive. “Wonderful night,” she said he wrote then on Instagram.
After attending Mr Trump’s inauguration, where she and Mr Brin had the best seats, she wrote in an Instagram story: “Thank you so much to my love because without him I wouldn’t have known the president and I wasn’t even at the inauguration.”
In another Instagram story, she criticized YouTube – which is owned by Google – for suspending Mr Trump’s account after the riots at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. “This kind of censorship was an abomination,” she wrote.
She was one of only four partners of tech leaders to attend a high-wattage dinner on artificial intelligence at the White House last September. Ms Gilbert-Soto sat next to Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, and across from Mr Trump, who shouted out her as Mr Brin’s “really fabulous MAGA girlfriend”.
Fighting the billionaire tax
Mr. Brin’s disillusionment with his longtime home state and his push for billionaires to pay more in taxes have jolted him out of his political slumber. Mr. Brin, who is Jewish, was also concerned about what he sees as the Democratic Party’s shift to the left, especially on Israel.
California was once “very liberating and liberating in thought,” Mr. Brin, a Stanford Ph.D. outage, said in an interview on campus in December, but added that the state is “running away” from its ideological roots.
Late last year, he began organizing California billionaires to rage in group chats on Signal and WhatsApp about a potential tax on their wealth. He called some of them for support, told advisers in his family office to develop plans to defeat the tax, and created two nonprofit groups to push his agenda.
He peppered California political officials with baseball questions about the state’s special signature-gathering process to place a measure on the ballot. He dined with candidates and attended campaign briefings.
Crucially, he has backed this speech with money, pouring $57 million into one of the nonprofit groups, Building a Better California, over the past four months.
The group insists it is not targeting a wealth tax. But in a communication to donors seen by The Times, the group specifically said it was offering “both short-term and long-term protection against wasteful government spending and any new taxes on personal property and personal property.”
Endorsing a Republican for Governor
Mr. Brin also tried to help decide a successor to Mr. Newsom, a term-limited Democrat.
In March, Mr. Brin donated $1 million to a group supporting Mayor Matt Mahan of San Jose, a moderate Democrat running for governor with support from the technology industry.
Days after the donation was made public, Mr. Mahan — then desperate to raise money — botched his plan and flew to the Lake Tahoe area to have dinner with Mr. Brin and Ms. Gilbert-Soto, according to three people familiar with the matter. Mr. Mahan and his campaign chairman, Joe Green, rode in the private jet of one of Mr. Brin’s friends, tech executive Ritankar Das, who joined the dinner.
At Mr. Brin’s home overlooking Lake Tahoe, Mr. Mahan tried to impress the billionaire. His inner circle expected more donations to flow. But Mr. Brin did not continue to give.
In late March, Mr. Mahan attended a “No Kings” rally — and Ms. Gilbert-Soto was angry. She became deeply critical of Mr. Mahan. “He’s awake and shit,” she said he wrote this month on X. “The personality of the wooden spoon. Boring.”
Ms. Gilbert-Soto is promoting another candidate for governor: Steve Hilton, a former Republican Tech Word News host backed by Mr. Trump. Mr. Brin gave about $40,000 to support Mr. Hilton, whom he has known for a long time because the candidate’s wife is a former Google executive.
Mr Hilton said Mr Brin made the donation after the billionaire approached him to call him.
“I laid out my plans for how I think we need to go in a different direction in California,” Mr. Hilton said. “And he seemed to agree with a lot of it — not necessarily everything — but enough to support my campaign financially, which I appreciated immensely.
The two men now text occasionally, Mr. Hilton said, and he and his wife had dinner this month at Mr. Brin and Ms. Gilbert-Soto’s home in California.
A political operation led by a billionaire
Mr Brin and his advisers are getting a crash course in politics as they try to stop the billionaire tax.
The head of Mr. Brin’s family office, George Pavlov, has been scrambling to learn how to finance a campaign, while the quarterbacks of the billionaire’s efforts are reaching out to California candidates asking for donations to Mr. Brin’s group that opposes the billionaire tax.
Another advisor is famous investor and long-time Alphabet board member John Doerr. Mr. Doerr played a major role behind the scenes of the Building a Better California project, soliciting contributions from fellow billionaires, and Mr. Doerr himself gave $10 million to the group, according to three people briefed on the talks.
The group quickly recruited Ned Wigglesworth, a veteran California ballot initiative consultant. He proposed a strategy to push three other ballot measures to compete with the billionaire tax measure, in part to challenge the tax on political grounds and in part to make it more expensive to get on the ballot.
Mr. Brin’s donations were channeled through two dark money groups he founded, including Compass4, a Nevada group he created in February to focus on affordability and election advocacy.
In group text messages and individual phone calls, Mr. Brin recruited colleagues to join in building a better California. Silicon Valley billionaires have gone into a frenzy over the proposed tax in recent months, touting ideas in group chats like buying signature-gathering firms, setting up escrow accounts and funding influencer marketing, all to the chagrin of the state’s operative class.
A total of $93 million was raised from billionaires including former Google board member Michael Moritz, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Mr. Larsen, a billionaire. The operatives sought to recruit big names to give the group instant credibility, and some of these billionaires put up money precisely to stand with Mr. Brin.
Kate Conger
Technology reporter
I report on the tech industry for The Times, and Teddy and I have written a lot recently about industry leaders who have dipped into politics – often with a right-wing slant. While some, like Elon Musk, have been involved at the federal level, Sergey Brin has focused his efforts on California. The state will likely be a testament to how effective his political giving and activism can be, and I wonder how the election results will affect him.
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