Her Billionaire Marriage Broke Up. Her VP Campaign Fizzled. Now She’s a Trump-world Star.

The Washington Post / Elizabeth Dwoskin, Ashley Parker, Meryl Kornfield, Aaron Schaffer

13:07 JST, October 24, 2024

During his recent live tour, Tucker Carlson welcomed a stable of MAGA warhorses to the stage: activist Charlie Kirk in Wichita, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones in Reading, Pennsylvania, Donald Trump Jr. in Jacksonville, Florida. But at a sold-out show on the outskirts of Houston, Carlson’s special guest was a new star in the right-wing firmament: Nicole Shanahan, running mate to former independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Until this year, Shanahan was a Democrat who had once moved easily among the Silicon Valley elite, a lawyer, tech entrepreneur and wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, one of the world’s richest men. Today, she is in the throes of a remarkable transformation, tapping a vast divorce settlement from 2023 to remake herself as an influencer and self-described “warrior mom” rallying independent women around fringe medical views – and former president Donald Trump.

Since Kennedy suspended his campaign and endorsed Trump in August, Shanahan, 39, has rebranded herself as a wellness guru promising to “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA). She has disavowed members of her old circle in tech, saying they want to overcome human limitations, such as aging, with technology. She has suggested that vaccines might have caused her daughter’s autism, an idea she said she “was not allowed to consider” in progressive Silicon Valley. And she has hinted publicly about running for governor of California.

Though Shanahan has said her politics don’t “overlap perfectly” with Trump’s, she has become a potent advocate for the former president, encouraging independent-minded voters to back his bid for the White House on Fox News, an array of podcasts and her increasingly popular social media feed. A prominent video ad she financed warns of “Trump Derangement Syndrome” and recommends “independence” as the remedy to a host of ills purportedly fostered by Democrats, including “forever wars,” “Orwellian totalitarianism” and “communist fiscal policy.”

Shanahan described Trump as “a former enemy” turned “partner in a time of need,” who she thinks can bring her main concerns about technology, health and the environment to the White House.

Shanahan’s transformation has alarmed former associates in Silicon Valley, a number of whom are Democrats, startled by her newfound political prominence. Interviews with 34 people familiar with her rise, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive matters, along with court documents, photographs, text messages and screenshots paint a portrait of a chameleon who rose from a violent, hardscrabble childhood to join one of the most elite circles of the tech industry – doggedly pursuing influence.

Her tumultuous marriage to Brin – the world’s 10th richest person, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index – is central to that rise. The marriage offered Shanahan entree to tech’s inner sanctum, but generated previously unreported personal drama that drove a wedge between Brin and Google co-founder Larry Page, as well as their friends and families, according to three people who know both men. When the divorce was finalized last year, Shanahan won what is likely one of the largest divorce settlements in U.S. history – as much as $1 billion, according to Forbes – and the means to pursue her political ambitions.

Within a year, she had bankrolled Kennedy’s quixotic presidential campaign. Now, those in the elite Silicon Valley circles she once ran in say they fear she will use her piece of the Google fortune to tip the razor-thin race between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, or push unverified medical views to a broad audience.

“Sergey gave her money so that she wasn’t going to do harmful things to him,” said one person familiar with Brin’s thinking. “So now she’s doing harmful things to the country.”

Shanahan has publicly described her backing of Trump as an outgrowth of her disillusionment with the medical establishment – and with the Democratic Party, which she has accused of trying to bring down Kennedy’s campaign and as being dominated by elitist groupthink, or progressive “programming.” She has pitched her MAHA movement as a cultural sanctuary for a generation of left-leaning and independent women whose faith in mainstream science was shattered during the pandemic, many of whom have turned to online communities and influencers for fellowship and information.

Wearing an ivory pantsuit onstage in Texas last month, Shanahan, who calls herself an independent, offered Carlson a red baseball cap emblazoned with the MAHA slogan, “a special gift,” she said, “from the MAHA peoples to the MAGA peoples.”

“Unity!” Carlson said, displaying the cap for the packed house. “Unity!” echoed Shanahan. The crowd roared.

But even Carlson seemed perplexed by Shanahan’s rapid metamorphosis.

“If I had asked you at a dinner party in San Francisco five years ago, do you think you’d be in, say, Sugar Land, Texas, campaigning for Donald Trump …” Carlson ventured.

“Like,” he concluded, “how did you get here?”

Shanahan became aware of reporting for this article when she and Kennedy were still campaigning. In June, she texted an associate who had been contacted by The Post to suggest a deal: Shanahan said she would “pay your friend” – The Post reporter – “half a million dollars to be a whistleblower” to expose people Shanahan claimed were spreading false information about her.

The contact relayed the offer to a Post reporter, who did not respond. After multiple requests for interviews with Shanahan since April, The Washington Post sent a detailed list of questions to her last week. She said she rejected parts of The Post’s reporting, but did not offer specific answers. “I’m so sorry you feel it is appropriate to do this for political motivations,” she said. “It’s a very sad state our country is in.”

“Unfortunately, this and other reports include inaccuracies about Sergey and his family,” said a spokeswoman representing Brin. Representatives for Page declined to comment on this article.

Friends defend Shanahan as a striver who gives generously to environmental and women’s health causes. She has said her MAHA evolution springs from convictions born during the coronavirus pandemic, when she came to question whether “environmental toxins” had injured her only child, a daughter born in 2018.

Whatever the MAHA backstory, a friend of Shanahan’s noted that she has the right to spend the divorce settlement as she pleases.

“It is her money,” said the friend, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid being associated with Shanahan’s politics. “And whatever she chooses to do with it is fine.”

Shanahan, who was raised in Oakland, California, said on a recent podcast that “home was a hard place.” Her mother emigrated from China two years before she was born. Her late father was mentally ill and sometimes violent, she has said, adding that his drinking was a constant “my whole life.” From an early age, she learned to scrap and survive, she has said, busing tables at age 12 and later going to the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington.

After college, Shanahan moved to China, where she worked as a model and as a legal aide at a prominent Beijing law firm. She returned to the United States and eventually entered Santa Clara University Law School. Even before graduating in 2014, she started her own company, ClearAccessIP, which aimed to develop software to ease the complicated process of tracking patents.

Several people who knew Shanahan at the time described her as bubbly, determined and eager to make her mark.

“It takes – I don’t know if ‘chutzpah’ is the right word – but it takes a lot,” said professor Colleen Chien, who said she was impressed by Shanahan’s grasp of problems in patent law even as a first-year student.

“She’s not like one of these silver-spoon Silicon Valley kids where they just, like, go: ‘Here’s a million dollars, go start a business,’” said Jeremy Hanika, who worked for ClearAccessIP in its early days. “She was like a one-woman army.”

Hanika said Shanahan started the company with a few thousand dollars. A year later, she was still struggling to attract financing. According to an unemployment petition filed with the California Employment Development Department, the company “became insolvent when investor denied further funding of start-up” and was unable to pay wages. The state granted the claim, and Shanahan paid the worker back wages.

Still, she was determined to succeed, working long hours and traveling to raise money. She became engaged to an investor, Jeremy Kranz, converted to Judaism and began planning an August 2014 wedding – a Chinese banquet to be followed by a Jewish ceremony in wine country.

She told friends her goal was to bring her “public self to a peak.”

A month before the wedding, Shanahan was celebrating her bachelorette party at the Wanderlust yoga festival in Lake Tahoe when she met Brin hanging out in the pools, according to two of the people.

She was 28. Brin was 40 and amicably separated from his wife, health entrepreneur Anne Wojcicki, who had discovered his affair with a Google subordinate 13 years his junior a year earlier. He had learned that he carried a genetic marker for Parkinson’s disease and was living a carpe diem life of partying, private jets and a revolving cast of women. He told an associate he felt “like a kid in a candy store.”

Almost immediately, the pair began an intense courtship, with Brin buying Shanahan artwork by the prominent sculptor Dale Chihuly. Shanahan accompanied Brin to the annual Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert, returning to the Bay Area barely 24 hours before her wedding to Kranz, according to one person, as well as documents reviewed by The Post.

Kranz soon discovered the affair. He sought to have the marriage annulled after only 27 days, charging her with fraud – a claim he later dropped in part to “preserve [Shanahan’s] ability to practice law,” according to court documents. Kranz declined requests for comment.

As Brin and Shanahan grew closer, tensions also arose in his world. Friends and family members said the younger woman significantly limited his availability, damaging some of his long-term relationships, according to five of his associates.

Page was no fan of Brin’s freewheeling lifestyle, starting with the earlier affair. “Larry is kind of a family man – he doesn’t like philanderers,” said a person familiar with the relationship. “And Sergey was more like midlife crisis.”

Page disapproved of the new romance, three people said; according to one person, Page warned Brin against it. For a time, the men stopped kite-surfing together and socializing with each other’s families. At one point, they even stopped speaking, according to two people who know them. Their estrangement created tension within the upper ranks of Google, said two other people.

Relations with Brin’s family grew strained. In July 2015, Brin skipped the rehearsal dinner for his younger brother’s wedding to celebrate the first anniversary of his relationship with Shanahan, said one person familiar with the event.

He limited communication with Wojcicki and free-flowing visits from his children – who once wandered at will between Wojcicki’s home and a neighboring house that the couple owned in Los Altos – stopped, according to three people and documents viewed by The Post. Three people added that Brin regularly disappeared from family events during the Shanahan years – including his daughter’s birthday, two people said – with one describing him as “very much on the clock” when Shanahan was around.

Wojcicki declined to comment on the family relationships for this report.

At one point, Brin stopped paying for psychiatric treatment for a relative with serious mental health issues, according to two people and documents viewed by The Post. Shanahan was skeptical of the person’s medication, arguing that it was too expensive, one of the people said; she suggested the relative instead take up kickboxing as an emotional outlet. Without Brin’s financial support, the relative’s treatment protocol lapsed for a period, according to the person.

Brin had long told associates he had no intention of remarrying, five people said. But in 2018, he and Shanahan tied the knot in a private ceremony. Weeks later, Shanahan gave birth to a girl they named Echo.

By then, tension was surfacing within their relationship, said Dylan Gittleman, a friend of Shanahan’s who worked on business development as an adviser for ClearAccessIP. While Shanahan was still highly focused on work, Brin wanted to spend time vacationing abroad, Gittleman said. (Brin and Page both formally stepped away from Google management in 2019.)

Shanahan told Gittleman that she and Brin fought, Gittleman said, and their arguments became more frequent in 2020, when the couple – who had completed an Iron Man challenge in Hawaii and flown private jets all over the world – was cooped up by the coronavirus pandemic.

“When I was living as a wife of a billionaire, I was not the best version of myself,” Shanahan told People magazine in an interview last year. “I felt conflicted every day, like I couldn’t access the thing that made me what I am.”

The beginning of the end came in 2021, when Brin learned that Shanahan had slept with his longtime friend, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, according to the Wall Street Journal. Shanahan and Musk have publicly denied a sexual relationship. Still, Musk later publicly begged Brin for forgiveness at a party, according to two people familiar with the incident.

Brin and Shanahan separated that December and Brin filed for divorce in January 2022 – after selling $366 million worth of Tesla stock, according to Bloomberg. In solidarity, some members of Brin’s family stopped driving Teslas, one person said.

The divorce became final in May 2023, and Shanahan walked away with a notable chunk of Brin’s fortune, today valued at $140 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

“He paid her a ton of money because it just seemed easier than fighting with her,” said a friend of Brin’s. “A billion dollars seems like a lot of money to me, but to Sergey, it’s like airfare.”

The friend added: “I don’t think he thought she was going to use that money to run for vice president.”

Despite gaining national prominence as Kennedy’s running mate, Shanahan, in her X bio, describes herself simply as “Mom to Echo.”

Conceived naturally – but after a struggle involving fertility treatments – Echo, now 5, was diagnosed with autism at 18 months. Shanahan has described the experience as central to her embrace of unconventional wellness ideas, some of which are not backed by science, and, eventually, conservative politics.

In her interview with Carlson, Shanahan described mourning the autism diagnosis and recounted the pushback she says she received in Silicon Valley when she wondered whether childhood inoculations might have been a contributing factor.

“I swear to God, I gave birth to a healthy baby girl,” she said, adding that the child became “a different kid” a few months after being vaccinated.

Her grief led her to God and a greater sense of purpose, she told Carlson. “The loneliness, plus covid . . . led me to a place of utter destruction,” she said. “Coming out of that completely alone with a child that you feel helpless to help is a position that either leads you to total hermitage – or makes you a warrior mom.”

In the interview with People and other outlets, Shanahan has described throwing herself into autism research and contributing lavishly to start-ups focused on ecology and women’s health, in part to counter what she calls the corporate IVF industry and left-wing dogma that women must freeze their eggs.

She also created a podcast studio, launching a show called Back to the People and a “Council of the Canceled” interview series that features controversial figures in the wellness movement. Among her guests have been anti-vaccine activist and former British physician Andrew Wakefield, who is responsible for retracted research falsely linking autism to vaccines, and Houston doctor Mary Bowden, who famously touted the anti-parasitic drug ivermectin as a treatment for the coronavirus.

Though Shanahan joined Brin in protesting Trump’s 2017 ban on travelers from certain majority-Muslim countries – and told a friend at the time she thought Trump was “evil” – she has said she began warming to the former president after Democrats tried to block her and Kennedy from the ballot in several states. On podcasts and in other friendly interviews, she now describes Democrats as captive to corporate interests and elites pushing “transhumanism” values, which she describes as “the idea that technology can replace human function.”

As Election Day approaches, Shanahan has been creating and sharing pro-Trump videos, which she has said she produces at $7,000 a pop. She recently told journalist Megyn Kelly she aims to “engage someone from my background” and “deliver a gentle message … in a way that felt truthful.”

“The individuals that I will be speaking to over the next several weeks in the lead up to the election are the moms who have distaste for Donald Trump because they see him as a misogynist,” Shanahan told Roseanne Barr on her Sept. 27 show.

But Trump “respects the family,” Shanahan said. “He respects a mom being a mom.”