Sergey Brin Moves to the Right, With a ‘MAGA Girlfriend’ by His Side

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.

Mr. Newsom, who had never seemed inclined to support the tax, came out the next month and pledged to defeat it. He declined to comment on the interaction.

The December confrontation, which took place at a party thrown by the billionaire Chris Larsen and was recounted by three people briefed on it, reflected Mr. Brin’s new war footing. He is growing more politically agitated, more willing to spend his estimated $273 billion fortune on elections and evidently more receptive to Republican points of view.

Mr. Brin, 52, long showed little interest in politics. When he did, he embraced liberal causes: He donated to a campaign to defend same-sex marriage in California in 2008 and backed President Barack Obama’s re-election bid in 2012. He called President Trump’s election in 2016 “deeply offensive” in 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 started a nonprofit group that has spent at least $88 million on climate and environmental policy.

But now, like so many other leaders in the traditionally liberal bastion of Silicon Valley, Mr. Brin has shifted to the right.

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.

Mr. Brin is particularly rattled by the proposal for a one-time, 5 percent tax on California billionaires, and has emerged as Silicon Valley’s leading combatant of the measure. To escape the tax, he moved before a Dec. 31 deadline to the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe (he now spends every other week at Google’s California headquarters, alternating with Nevada, a person familiar with the arrangement said). And he has spent $57 million to try to undercut the measure, including $9 million more disclosed on Friday.

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 New York Times spoke with more than a dozen people close to Mr. Brin for this article, many of whom were granted anonymity to describe private conversations.

Mr. Brin’s spending, along with smaller donations in the California governor’s race, have made him the state’s second-largest individual donor this election cycle — behind only the billionaire Tom Steyer, who is running for governor himself.

“This is a guy who is not a hobbyist,” said Marty Wilson, the longtime political chief of the California Chamber of Commerce, who has spoken with Mr. Brin’s aides. “He’s very serious and this isn’t just some hobby for him. He’s going to play big time.”

A Girlfriend Who’s a Big Trump Fan

Mr. Brin’s political engagement has roughly coincided with his relationship with Ms. Gilbert-Soto, which began in 2023. Mr. Brin began dating her after divorcing from Nicole Shanahan, who served in 2024 as Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s running mate.

Ms. Gilbert-Soto, 32, who goes by GG, describes herself on Instagram as a “holistic health coach” and a “clean meat enthusiast.” She, like Mr. Brin, regularly attends the Burning Man festival, and she appeared on a season of the reality television series “Vanderpump Rules.”

But she also styles herself as a firebrand in Trumpworld, and even some of the president’s own aides are struck by her loyalty. She has called Mr. Trump her “bestie,” owns a clutch bedazzled with “MAGA,” and has shown off a photo of Mr. Brin in a red MAGA hat, two people who saw it said. After the comedian Seth Rogen made anti-Trump jokes at an event last year, Ms. Gilbert-Soto was incensed and complained to other guests, one attendee said. She declined an interview request.

Ms. Gilbert-Soto’s ability to work herself into rooms with powerful people and her influence with Mr. Brin have amused some of his peers in Silicon Valley and inside Google (he remains on the board of its parent company, Alphabet).

In December, she accompanied Mr. Brin to Florida to meet the conservative podcaster Ben Shapiro at his studio. She has traveled with him several times to see Mr. Trump at Mar-a-Lago or the White House — and prolifically detailed their visits on social media.

During the presidential transition, Ms. Gilbert-Soto attended an intimate, four-person dinner at Mar-a-Lago with Mr. Trump, Mr. Brin and Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive. “Awesome night,” she wrote afterward on Instagram.

After attending Mr. Trump’s inauguration, where she and Mr. Brin had prime seating, she wrote in an Instagram story: “Mucho gratitude for my lovey, as without him I wouldn’t know the president or have even been at the inauguration.”

In another Instagram story, she criticized YouTube — which is owned by Google — over its suspension of Mr. Trump’s account after the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol. “This kind of censorship was an abomination,” she wrote.

She was one of just four partners of tech leaders who attended a high-wattage dinner about artificial intelligence last September at the White House. Ms. Gilbert-Soto sat next to Tim Cook, the Apple chief executive, and across from Mr. Trump, who gave her a shout-out as Mr. Brin’s “really wonderful MAGA girlfriend.”

Fighting a Billionaire Tax

Mr. Brin’s disillusionment with his longtime home state, and its push to make billionaires pay more in taxes, have jolted him out of his political slumber. Mr. Brin, who is Jewish, has also been perturbed by what he sees as the leftward drift of the Democratic Party, particularly on Israel.

California was once “very freeing and liberating in thought,” Mr. Brin, a Stanford Ph.D. dropout, said in an interview on campus in December, but he added that the state was “getting away” from its ideological roots.

Late last year, he started to organize California billionaires who were fuming in group chats on Signal and WhatsApp about the potential tax on their wealth. He called some of them to drum up support, told aides in his family office to draw up plans to defeat the tax and created two nonprofit groups to push his agenda.

He peppered California political operatives with inside-baseball questions about the state’s peculiar signature collection process to place a measure on the ballot. He dined with candidates and joined campaign briefings.

Crucially, he backed up the talk with money, putting $57 million over the last four months into one of the nonprofit groups, Building a Better California.

The group insists it is not focused on the wealth tax. But in communications to donors seen by The Times, the group has explicitly said it offers both “the near-term and longer-term protection against wasteful government spending and any and all new taxes on personal property and personal assets.”

Backing a Republican for Governor

Mr. Brin has also tried to help decide the successor to Mr. Newsom, a Democrat who is term-limited.

In March, Mr. Brin donated $1 million to a group supporting Mayor Matt Mahan of San Jose, a moderate Democrat running for governor with backing from the tech industry.

A few days after the donation became public, Mr. Mahan — then desperate for cash — scrambled his schedule and flew to the Lake Tahoe area for dinner with Mr. Brin and Ms. Gilbert-Soto, according to three people with knowledge of the matter. Mr. Mahan and his campaign chairman, Joe Green, hitched a ride on the private plane of one of Mr. Brin’s friends, the 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 giving.

In late March, Mr. Mahan attended a “No Kings” rally — and Ms. Gilbert-Soto was upset. She has turned deeply critical of Mr. Mahan. “He is woke and he sucks,” she wrote this month on X. “Personality of a wooden spoon. Boring.”

Ms. Gilbert-Soto has been promoting a different candidate for governor: Steve Hilton, a Republican former Fox News host endorsed by Mr. Trump. Mr. Brin gave about $40,000 to back Mr. Hilton, whom he has long known because the candidate’s wife is a former Google executive.

Mr. Hilton said Mr. Brin made the donation after the billionaire reached out to him for a phone call.

“I laid out my plans for how I think that we need to go in a different direction in California,” Mr. Hilton said. “And he seemed to agree with much of that — not necessarily all of it — but enough to support my campaign financially, which I hugely appreciated.”

The two men now text occasionally, Mr. Hilton said, and he and his wife had a meal at Mr. Brin and Ms. Gilbert-Soto’s home in California this month.

A Billionaire-Led Political Operation

Mr. Brin and his advisers are getting a crash course in politics as they try to stop the billionaires tax.

The head of Mr. Brin’s family office, George Pavlov, is racing to learn campaign finance as he quarterbacks the billionaire’s efforts, fielding inquiries from candidates in California and soliciting donations for Mr. Brin’s group opposing the billionaire tax.

Another adviser is the famous investor and longtime Alphabet board member John Doerr. Mr. Doerr has played a major behind-the-scenes role with Building a Better California, soliciting contributions from fellow billionaires, according to three people briefed on the talks, and Mr. Doerr himself has given the group $10 million.

That group quickly enlisted Ned Wigglesworth, an experienced California ballot initiative consultant. He devised a strategy of pushing three other ballot measures that would compete against the measure for the billionaire tax, in part to challenge the tax on policy grounds and in part to make it costlier to get on the ballot.

Mr. Brin’s donations have been channeled through two dark-money groups he started, including Compass4, a Nevada-based one he created in February to focus on affordability and election advocacy.

In group texts and one-on-one phone calls, Mr. Brin has recruited peers to join Building a Better California. Silicon Valley billionaires have worked themselves into a frenzy about the proposed tax in recent months, floating ideas in group chats like buying signature collection firms, starting 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 the former Google board member Michael Moritz, the former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt and Mr. Larsen, the billionaire. Operatives sought to recruit big names to give the group instant credibility, and some of those billionaires gave money precisely to stand with Mr. Brin.