Sergey Brin, who co-founded Google with Larry Page, is ranked No. 3 on the Forbes 2026 World’s Billionaires list with a net worth of $237 billion. Born in Moscow, he moved to the United States at the age of six.
Sergey Mikhailovich Brin was born on August 21, 1973, in Moscow, then in the Soviet Union, into a Russian-Jewish family. His father, Mikhail, is a retired mathematics professor at the University of Maryland, and his mother, Eugenia (1948–2024), was a researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
Net Worth and Rank
- Forbes 2026 list: No. 3, with $237 billion
- Source of wealth: his stake in Alphabet, Google’s parent company
Leaving the Soviet Union
In 1977, after a mathematics conference in Warsaw, Brin’s father decided the family should emigrate, citing antisemitism in the Soviet Union. The family applied for exit visas in September 1978, and his father was promptly fired. They were granted permission in May 1979 and moved to the United States.
Education and Google
Brin earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and computer science at the University of Maryland, College Park, and in 1993 enrolled in the computer-science PhD programme at Stanford University. There he met Larry Page, and together they built a search engine. It became popular at Stanford and he discontinued his PhD to start Google in Susan Wojcicki’s garage in Menlo Park, California.
- Alphabet: he was president of Google’s parent company until stepping down in 2019
- Control: he and Page remain at Alphabet as co-founders, controlling shareholders and board members
- Return to AI: in 2023 he came out of retirement to contribute to AI research at Alphabet
Parkinson’s Research
Brin’s mother was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. According to Forbes, as cited by Wikipedia, he has donated more than $1 billion to fund research on the disease.
Why It Matters
Brin and Page’s search engine reshaped how people find information, and Alphabet now competes at the centre of the AI race, which has raised the value of their shares.
Net worth figures change daily with share prices. Rankings here follow the Forbes 2026 World’s Billionaires list, with wealth measured on March 1, 2026.
Image: Sergey Brin at a conference in 2005. Photo: JD Lasica / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)
