What is Nicole Shanahan's net worth?
Nicole Shanahan is an American lawyer and politician who has a net worth of $1 billion. Nicole Shanahan received the bulk of her fortune through her marriage and eventual divorce from Google co-founder Sergey Brin. Nicole and Sergey were married from 2018 to 2022. Their divorce was finalized in mid-2023. They have one child together, a daughter who was born in 2018.
In July 2024, the Wall Street Journal alleged that Nicole had an affair with Elon Musk, one of Sergey's oldest friends, and this affair is what led to their divorce. More on this alleged incident in the paragraphs below.
In March 2024, Nicole was named as Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s vice presidential running mate for the 2024 presidential campaign. A month earlier, a Super PAC funded by Shanahan paid $5-7 million to produce and air a controversial commercial in support of Kennedy that aired during the Super Bowl. Much to the chagrin of his family members, the ad reused footage from a 1960s JFK campaign. RJF Jr., who is unsupported by his family, was forced to apologize for the ad.
(Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
Sergey Brin Marriage and Divorce Settlement
Nicole and Sergey met in July 2014 at a yoga festival in Lake Tahoe. At the time, she was engaged to a tech investor named Jeremy Asher Kranz. Nicole and Jeremy married in September of that year, just a few weeks after Nicole and Sergey's yoga retreat. At the time, Brin was recently separated from Anne Wojcicki, the founder of 23andme and the sister of Susan Wojcicki, one of Google's first employees and the one-time head of YouTube.
Nicole and Sergey allegedly began an affair soon after meeting at the yoga retreat. Her fiance, Jeremy, allegedly learned of the affair just a few days before their wedding after seeing salacious text messages on her phone. He filed to annul the marriage 27 days after the wedding. In their settlement, Nicole agreed to pay $20,000 to cover part of the wedding cost and divorce legal fees. She also agreed to remove all photos of him from her social media accounts.
Sergey filed for divorce in January 2022 for alleged reasons we detail in the next section below. It has been mostly confirmed that in their settlement, Brin transferred 2.6 million shares of Alphabet (Google) Class B shares, which would be worth around $400 million today. She may have also received an equal amount of Class C shares, not to mention any cash value, to cover Nicole's share of the homes they owned together in Lake Tahoe, Montana, Los Altos, and Malibu. In total, it is generally believed that Nicole Shanahan's divorce settlement from Sergey Brin was worth $1 billion all-in.
(Photo by Stefanie Keenan/Getty Images for Academy Museum of Motion Pictures )
Alleged Elon Musk Affair
As we mentioned a moment ago, Nicole and Sergey Brin were married from 2018 to 2022. His divorce filing was first made public in July 2022, but it would later be revealed that they officially separated on December 15, 2021 and that Sergey filed for divorce a few weeks later in January 2022. This will be important in a moment.
On July 24, 2022, the Wall Street Journal published a salacious allegation that their divorce was caused because Sergey discovered that Nicole had an affair with Elon Musk. According to the friends who supposedly spoke with the WSJ, Brin and Nicole Shanahan were separated when the alleged affair occurred, but they were still living together. If true, this would be especially painful to Sergey because he and Elon have been friends for decades, and in fact Sergey was one of the very first investors in Tesla.
(Photo by JOSH EDELSON/AFP via Getty Images)
The WSJ specifically claimed that "according to a person close to Ms. Shanahan," Elon and Nicole allegedly had an affair in "early December 2021" while they were both attending Art Basel in Miami. That year, Art Basel took place from December 1 – 3.
In the hours after the WSJ article went live, Elon denied the allegations and even went so far as to post a photo of himself at a party that very same day standing a few feet away from Sergey, purportedly to show they were still friends. The WSJ also released a follow-up statement, "We are confident in our sourcing, and we standby our reporting."
After reading the WSJ article, we at CelebrityNetWorth did a little bit of digging into Elon Musk's private jet usage around the time of the alleged affair. Thanks to the now-banned Twitter account @ElonJet, we were able to see exactly what Elon was up to around December 1 when Art Basel was going on. Using public transponder data to automatically track Elon's Gulfstream G650, @ElonJet showed that on the afternoon of December 1, Elon's jet took a two-hour flight from Austin, Texas, too… Miami, Florida. According to @ElonJet, Elon's jet landed in Miami at 9:45 pm local time and took off at 1:45 am, technically the early morning of December 2. In other words, he was indeed in Miami for around four hours on December 1 and 2.
The WSJ finally alleged that at a party sometime in 2022, after the alleged affair, Elon bumped into Sergey and "dropped to one knee in front of Mr. Brin and apologized profusely for the transgression, begging for forgiveness."
Here is Elon's denial
This is total bs. Sergey and I are friends and were at a party together last night!
I've only seen Nicole twice in three years, both times with many other people around. Nothing romantic.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 25, 2022
Early Life & Education
Nicole Shanahan was born in Placer County, California, on September 26, 1985. She was raised in Oakland, California. Her late father is of German and Irish descent, and her mother is Chinese. In campaign interviews, she has claimed that, at times, the family relied on food stamps and other government assistance.
She attended Saint Mary's College High School in Berkeley, California. She has claimed she attended on an athletic scholarship, but the school has since denied it offers such scholarships. She enrolled at the University of Puget Sound in Washington State, where she graduated in 2007 with a degree in Asian studies, economics, and Mandarin Chinese. After graduating, she worked as a paralegal and patent specialist for a time before deciding to pursue a law degree at Santa Clara University School of Law. She received her J.D. in 2014.
Other Endeavors
After law school, Nicole founded a legal tech company called ClearAccessIP. In 2020, she sold the company to a competitor called IPwe for $10 million worth of the acquiring company's stock. IPwe filed for bankruptcy in 2024.
Nicole and Sergey have a daughter named Echo, who is autistic. Nicole has since claimed that her daughter's diagnosis made her question the common practice of childhood vaccines.
In 2019, Nicole founded a criminal justice/fertility foundation called Bia-Echo, using $23 million worth of Google shares provided by Brin. She has pledged to invest $100 million into the foundation over time. Shanahan has been a vocal critic of in vitro fertilization and hopes to help older women become pregnant through unconventional medical methods. She also hopes to use the foundation to help cure autism.
