'they’ve Awakened Him’: How A Wealth Tax Fight Made Brin A Political Force

Sergey Brin once called government a “giant bonfire of partisanship” and spent years on the political sidelines. But in recent months, the Google co-founder has emerged as a political force in California, pouring unprecedented sums into the fight to defeat a proposed tax on billionaires.

This year alone, Brin has spent about 40 times what he put into politics in the previous two decades, making him the biggest individual donor to a ballot measure campaign in California history.

His roughly $100 million effort to defeat Proposition 40, a proposed one-time 5% tax on billionaires’ assets, is the centerpiece of a new political operation that reaches well beyond the measure. Led by Brin and funded by some of California’s wealthiest residents, the group is also backing two initiatives designed to invalidate the tax even if voters approve it. It has put $17 million behind separate ballot measures to spur housing construction and speed environmental reviews.

His spending against the wealth tax is undercutting one of the top priorities of progressive Democrats nationally — what Bernie Sanders called the most important ballot measure in America. And if he sustains the operation he launched earlier this year, spending heavily in the state’s expensive ballot wars, he could wield outsized influence in California politics for years to come.

“Brin could have easily just run a No campaign and defeated [Prop 40], but he built a whole organization,” said Brandon Castillo, a veteran ballot measures consultant who is not working on either side of the wealth tax campaign. “They’ve awakened him. He wants to be a political player.”

His entry caught political observers in the state off guard. Earlier this year, a prominent campaign lawyer delivered a quintet of proposed initiatives to the California attorney general’s office and set off a whodunit among Sacramento’s ballot-watchers. All five seemed purposefully designed to undercut the wealth tax, but no one initially took credit. On the same day, a new committee called Building a Better California came into existence with an official from Brin’s personal operation listed on the paperwork.

Brin revealed his involvement later that month. While the PAC initially downplayed its focus on the wealth tax, stressing initial checks for the housing-focused measures, it has since spent more than $200 million to halt the levy — including on two of those five mystery measures, Proposition 41 and 42, that would invalidate Prop 40.

It was a sharp turn for a man whose giving had long been sporadic and tied to specific causes — seemingly content, like other tech executives at the time, to shape the world through innovation and philanthropy.

Brin became one of the world’s richest people as his startup grew into a tech behemoth. And he has poured millions into campaigns as Silicon Valley companies, including Google, vastly expanded their spending in a hostile political climate over the last decade.

As Democratic politicians increasingly cast tech companies and their billionaire leaders as unaccountable threats to democracy, Google ramped up its Sacramento lobbying activity. It spent about $560,000 on lobbying during the 2015-2016 legislative session; last session, that figure soared to $13.5 million. The company has also poured more than $8 million into California campaigns this cycle, up from $390,000 a decade ago.

Even before Prop 40, many tech titans — besieged by public opinion and disillusioned with Democratic governance — had begun discussing how to exert more political influence in the state. The wealth tax “sped everything up,” said political consultant Jim DeBoo, with Brin leading the initial charge.

“The big thing about Brin is he stepped out there and took a lot of arrows early, and people in the community saw that and said we need to step in and help,” said DeBoo, who is working against the wealth tax but not for Brin or Building a Better California. Brin’s group, he added, “has a long-term strategy that goes beyond this election, and that’s not going to stop.”

After the IPO

When Google went public in 2004, Brin instantly became one of the richest men in the world. In interviews afterwards, he seemed to be grappling with a new identity that was far removed from the computer-science doctoral student who had come to the United States from the Soviet Union at age 6.

“I don’t think my quality of life is really going to improve that much with more money," he said in a 2004 interview, months after the Google IPO made him a billionaire. “It takes a lot of getting used to,” he told Time Magazine in 2006. ‘I always figured in the back of my mind that money will buy you a little bit of happiness. But it’s not really true.” During a panel in the UK two years later in 2008, he seemed almost fearful of the effect his new status would have on his life.

“You drive through different neighborhoods, you can kind of see where people are more secluded because they have bigger houses, bigger lots, and they're wealthier,” Brin said. “I think it requires great care for people who come into sudden wealth, if you will, to avoid those kinds of traps.”

Brin was by no means an ascetic. That same year he made those comments, in 2008, he bought a fighter jet with Google’s Larry Page. Two years later, he purchased a $5 million mansion in Los Altos Hills, a wealthy enclave south of San Francisco. He invested millions into space travel tourism, serving as a functional deposit for his future trip out of the atmosphere.

He engaged in state politics occasionally, doling out six-figure dollops of his immense fortune to preserve same-sex marriage, boost stem-cell research, and uphold California’s cap-and-trade system. He was not averse to tax hikes, spending $1 million to pass an oil-severance tax in a campaign also funded by fellow tech titans like Page and venture capitalist John Doerr.

Some of the causes he embraced shared a theme: resisting what he saw as government overreach.

In a 2008 Google blog post, he outlined his opposition to Prop 8 — the California ballot initiative to ban gay marriage, which would go on to narrowly pass. The measure crossed a line, he said, by encouraging “government encroachment on personal lives.”

“We hope that California voters will vote no on Proposition 8 — we should not eliminate anyone's fundamental rights, whatever their sexuality, to marry the person they love,” he wrote.

And in 2010, Brin reportedly led the push for Google to withdraw from China due to what the company viewed as encroaching government censorship on the web. Brin told the Wall Street Journal that Chinese repression of dissent conjured dark memories of police visiting his home while a young boy in the Soviet Union.

A political evolution

As a not-so-distant Stanford graduate ascending through Silicon Valley’s millionaire-minting ecosystem, Brin was “absolutely a Dem and believed in all the Dem views,” said a Silicon Valley bundler who was granted anonymity to speak candidly.

Beyond a handful of political causes, however, Brin directed much of his giving to philanthropy, including the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, which helped his family come to the U.S

Although he was a supporter of President Barack Obama, giving $36,000 to Obama’s reelection campaign in 2012, he projected disgust with politics, decrying heightened partisanship in the runup to the election and urging politicians to run as independents “in name and spirit.”

When Donald Trump was elected in 2016, Brin told Google employees in leaked comments that the outcome was “deeply offensive” to him as an immigrant. The following year, Brin joined a protest at San Francisco International Airport over the president’s first immigration ban, and again raised the specter of the Soviet Union. It seemed as if Brin was on the way to becoming more politically engaged, poised to counter the policies of the new administration.

Instead, Brin essentially disappeared from the political sphere for close to a decade, emerging last year with a more conservative set of values.

In the past 16 months he attended a JD Vance fundraiser, gave nearly $450,000 to the Republican National Committee, contributed to Republican Steve Hilton’s campaign for California governor, supported Republican Spencer Pratt in the Los Angeles mayoral race, and even joined the Trump White House’s tech council. Brin also contributed $1 million to a PAC supporting moderate Democrat Matt Mahan’s unsuccessful bid for California governor, joining other Silicon Valley titans who backed the tech-friendly candidate.

Today, he is reported to be in a relationship with Gerelyn Gilbert-Soto, a wellness influencer in her early 30s whom Trump has referred to as Brin’s “really wonderful MAGA girlfriend.” In recent years, Gilbert-Soto has elbowed her way into Trump-world inner sanctums and a White House dinner in 2025 while earning a reputation as a dogged defender of the president.

“He’s gotten wealthier and wealthier and has hung out with a lot of wealthy people who are either Republicans or in wealth-protection mode, which tends to lean Republican,” the bundler said. “He’s trended in that direction the last 12 to 15 years but it’s been amplified by the people he’s surrounded himself with — especially the person he’s intimate with.”

Brin did not respond to requests for an interview for this article. But in a statement, a spokesperson for Building a Better California said that organization was intent on “protecting our unique economy and advancing smart, accountable policies that improve affordability and quality of life for everyone.”

“Those goals aren’t oppositional; they depend on each other, and that's the thinking behind every measure we're backing,” the spokesperson said.

‘Who is Mr. Brin?’

Brin has singlehandedly ensured that supporters of the wealth tax are overwhelmingly outspent. He’s also given them something every campaign covets: a villain.

On a steamy Saturday night in San Francisco, Rep. Ro Khanna warmed up the crowd at a Prop 40 rally, accusing prominent Democrats opposing the tax, like Newsom, of aligning themselves with “Trump allies like Peter Thiel and Sergey Brin.”

Then Khanna yielded the stage to Sen. Bernie Sanders, the man the audience had come to see — and Sanders, who has framed the campaign as the ultimate test of whose side Democrats are on, made sure everyone knew where Brin stood.

“Who is Mr. Brin?” Sanders rhetorically asked the audience before rattling off some facts about him. The world’s fourth-richest man has accumulated billions more since Trump became president, Sanders told the crowd to a fresh round of boos.

Trying to protect your assets is one thing, Sanders continued. “What really disgusts me,” he said, was the “extortion” Brin and others were engaging in by threatening to leave California over the tax, calling it “pathetic” and “immoral.”

“The reason the billionaire class is so upset is they know if you can pull this off here in California, we’re going to do this all over the country,” Sanders said. “People are sick and tired of the greed of these billionaires.”

Sean McMinn contributed to this story.