Marty Levine
May 7, 2026
Why is one person’s voice more important than another’s?
That is a question this article from last Sunday’s New York Times, “Sergey Brin Moves to the Right, With a ‘MAGA Girlfriend’ by His Side”, left me pondering. It’s a long article, over 2,000 words. It involved significant reporting by two Times reporters, Theodore Schleifer and Kate Conger. And it was deemed important enough to feature in the Sunday edition.
The story is a simple one that could have been written about any of us. A person at one time in their life believed something but today seems to have changed their mind and believes the opposite.
It could have been written about me decades ago when I felt Israel was a central part of Jewish life. Today I believe quite the opposite. Over time, we learn new things; we have new experiences; our life circumstances change for better or worse; our circle of friends changes, and with all of these changes our opinions about things change.
Yes, Mr. Brin was more liberal years ago and aligned with the Democratic Party. Now he has moved to the right and aligns with President Trump and the MAGA movement he leads. I think that is true of millions of men and women. In fact, I think that the 2020 election and Donald Trump’s victory is the result of millions of voters shifting just as Mr. Brin has shifted.
The Times did not write this story because Mr. Brin shifted his politics. They wrote this story because Mr. Brin is the 3rd wealthiest person in the World, according to Forbes, with a personal fortune estimated to be $237 billion. They wrote this story because our system does not see each of us as equals. It provides power and influence to those who can pay for it. We have become a government that is pay-to-play. And, therefore, Mr. Brin changing his mind is very different from any of us commoners changing our minds.
It seems that Mr. Brin is put off by the progressive wing of the Democratic Party having the temerity, and now the power, to challenge his right to unlimited wealth. This is evidenced by the proposed California Wealth Tax, a proposal to ask California’s voters to approve “a one-time 5% wealth tax on an estimated 200 taxpayers and trusts with assets valued over $1 billion” in order to support health care and other safety net services that have seen massive losses of federal funding since the beginning of Trump’s return to the Presidency.
I’ve written often (my editor might say too often) about the ability of the very wealthy to escape paying their fair share under a taxation system that is skewed to their benefit. The wealthy can borrow against their fortune to cover living expenses. Borrowed funds are not income. President Trump and the Republican controlled Congress have lowered tax rates for the wealthiest. The California proposal seeks to work around those barriers to force a fair share payment by that state’s wealthiest residents.
The New Times article clearly tells us why Mr. Brin has changed his mind — good old self-interest.
It was a holiday party at a crypto titan’s estate in Marin County, and Sergey Brin had a bone to pick with Gavin Newsom.
Mr. Brin, a Google co-founder and one of the world’s richest people, is a longtime friend of Mr. Newsom, the California governor. Both men attended each other’s weddings. But now Mr. Brin pulled Mr. Newsom aside to a different 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. Even as she tried to defuse the tension — joking that she would let Mr. Newsom’s bad policies slide because he was handsome — she argued that the measure would wreck California’s economy…
With his outspokenly 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 fund-raiser featuring 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 of tech companies. This March, he was named to a White House tech council and donated to a Republican candidate for governor of California who has since earned Mr. Trump’s endorsement…
Asked for comment on this article, Mr. Brin said in a rare statement: “I fled socialism with my family in 1979 and know the devastating, oppressive society it created in the Soviet Union. I don’t want California to end up in the same place.”
The Times article focuses on Mr. Brin’s change of mind because he is so very rich and wealth provides him with inordinate political clout.
Although Mr. Brin says he is afraid of socialism, he and the NY Times fail to point out that his fortune is built on investments made by the Federal Government. Here’s how the Center for American Progress told that story 22 years ago, shortly after Google’s first IPO made Mr. Brin a billionaire.
What is not widely known is the contribution that federal research funding played in creating Google. Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergei Brin – two computer science graduate students at Stanford University. Stanford was one of a number of universities that received funding under the “Digital Libraries Initiative” – supported by the National Science Foundation, NASA, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. (DARPA is the agency that funded the ARPANET in the late 1960’s, the computer network that led to today’s Internet). The goal of the initiative, launched in 1994, was to “dramatically advance the means to collect, store, and organize information in digital forms, and make it available for searching, retrieval, and processing via communication networks – all in user-friendly ways.” Larry Page was funded under the DLI as a graduate student researcher, and Sergei Brin was supported with an NSF graduate student fellowship. Page and other Stanford researchers created an algorithm called PageRank. It ranks the importance of each Web page based on the number and importance of other Web pages that link to it. This technological advance enabled Page and Brin to develop a search engine that found useful and relevant information, which was critical to Google’s popularity. Google was also prototyped on equipment paid for by the federal government’s Digital Library Initiative.
When that article was published, Mr. Brin’s wealth totaled about $4 billion. In 22 years since then, the investment of the American people in the research has allowed him to grow his fortune by more than 300 times.
That’s the story the NY Times failed to tell.
Billionaires like Mr. Brin appear to think their success and their enormous wealth are the result of their unique skills and talents.
Ted Turner, who died last Wednesday, being interviewed by David Bradly in 2010, had some wise words that Mr. Brin and his fellow plutocrats would be well to remember
BRADLEY: Do you see a duty of the large corporate CEO to some public good other than wealth generation?
TURNER: Yes, I do think so. I think we all have — we have numerous debts. We have debts to education, because education — without it, we wouldn’t be where we are. And we have debts to our government and to society as a whole…
So I do believe that we all are somewhat responsible for our society and we all should pitch in and do our share.
Would these fortunes have been possible without the investments of our government? Would these fortunes have been possible if Brin and his fellow wise and rich men had not been allowed to take the fruits of that public investment, create a business, and reap the profits? Would these fortunes have been possible without a tax system that protects their wealth?
I think not.
We can change that if we have the will to demand they pay their fair share..
