The story behind Google co-founder Sergey Brin’s liaison with Google Glass marketing manager Amanda Rosenberg—and his split from his wife, genetic-testing entrepreneur Anne Wojcicki— has a decidedly futuristic edge. But, the drama leaves Silicon Valley debating emotional issues, from office romance to fear of mortality.
“Sergey is a beloved oddball of a guy, and unlike [Google’s current and former C.E.O.’s] Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, he’s the one who gets to do the cool stuff at Google,” says an industry observer. “He said, ‘Larry, you do the hard, prestigious work, and at the end of your life you’ll do the fun stuff, like Bill Gates. But I’m cutting out the bullshit and Davos and doing the fun stuff right now.’ ” Wojcicki, in her professional life as well as her personal one, is a powerful woman with ambitions that are enormous, which she funnels into her genetic-testing company, 23andMe. Last fall, Fast Company put her on the cover as “The Most Daring CEO in America.”
Slim and attractive, Wojcicki is currently living on her own, trying to manage the children while engaged in a serious battle over saving 23andMe, which has come under fire from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Rosenberg is wrestling with an even more pernicious demon: depression.
Several former Google employees say that the company is casual in its approach to dating at work. One says that Google is “intentionally agnostic about dating,” and that there are hundreds of “Google couples” among its global offices. In fact, Google’s code of conduct does not ban dating between employees, saying, “Romantic relationships between co-workers can, depending on the work roles and respective positions of the co-workers involved, create an actual or apparent conflict of interest. If a romantic relationship does create an actual or apparent conflict, it may require changes to work arrangements or even the termination of employment of either or both individuals involved.”
Wojcicki, unlike many wives of rich men, wasn’t enthusiastic about collecting art or jewelry, and she argued against buying planes and boats, says the friend of the couple’s. Some say she can be headstrong and withholding of praise, hot to her own ideas and dismissive of others’. Wojcicki is adamant about wanting a “normalized” life, says a source close to her, using the Silicon Valley billionaires’ phrase for “normal.” But there’s nothing normal about the astronomical wealth, or the power that comes from being the ones changing the world.
In 2006, Wojcicki co-founded 23andMe and soon raised several rounds of financing, including $6.5 million from Google. She hoped to attract over a million customers to her company, coaxing them to spit into a tube and send the saliva to her DNA-genotyping lab for today’s low price of $99. Her mission was to pass along as much information as possible about each person’s health and ancestry, on the principle that this knowledge, by rights, is ours. But not everyone receives good news; many have learned about elevated levels of risk for breast cancer, Alzheimer’s, or Parkinson’s. Some health-care professionals believe it is unwise to give individuals such daunting news without the support of personal counseling.
Wojcicki, it turns out, had a more personal stake in her business than one might imagine. Brin’s great-aunt suffered from Parkinson’s, the neuro-degenerative disorder, and his mother was diagnosed with it in 1999. It was long thought that Parkinson’s was not hereditary. But beginning in 2004, researchers suggested that people with a certain gene mutation (more common among Ashkenazi Jews) have a risk of between 30 and 75 percent of succumbing to the disease. (The general population’s risk is about 1 percent.) When Wojcicki tested Brin, his results were positive for the mutation. Brin read the risk as possibly having only about 10 good years left, says the friend of the couple’s.
After getting such news, some of us would curl up into a ball, but Brin didn’t. Unlike Steve Jobs, who fiercely guarded news about his health, Brin started a blog and announced his results publicly, at Google’s Zeitgeist conference in 2008 in Mountain View. Brin began exercising even more relentlessly than usual, and drinking coffee, which some doctors recommend for those at risk for the disease, even though he abhorred the taste. (He eventually switched to green tea.) He told Wired magazine that he hoped those steps might reduce his risk by half, and if research on the brain progresses, as he believes it will, his risk could be cut in half again.
In addition, Wojcicki and Brin have the means to aid such research, and they have given more than $150 million to the Michael J. Fox Foundation and $7 million to the Parkinson’s Institute. They have also donated to the Breakthrough Prizes, one of which was awarded to a Parkinson’s researcher at a ceremony at the NASA Ames Research Center, in Mountain View, last fall co-hosted by Vanity Fair. Research on the 10,000 Parkinson’s sufferers that Wojcicki has recruited at 23andMe, the largest cohort of these genotypes in the world, might cut Brin’s risk even more. “Somewhere under 10 percent” is his own assessment.
While Glass was blowing up in the press, a friend admits, Wojcicki may have been a bit hard on Brin. “Anne is great, but she can be difficult,” says the friend. “She’s hard on Sergey, and she doesn’t let him get away with things.” She was focused on saving him: when research discovered that a gene variant might protect those with Brin’s rare Parkinson’s-related mutation, Wojcicki patented it. (Like many of her business decisions, patenting genes—a move often seen as an attempt to corner a drug market—is controversial in the medical establishment.)
Wojcicki still wanted a normal life, or as normal as she could have: to be a dedicated mom and for the family to have dinner together. But “instead of just being a Google founder, Sergey was suddenly awesome, a cool person, a performer—a celebrity!” says the friend of the couple’s. “And he was like, ‘Wait a second—I’m doing all this cool stuff, and then I have to come home and change diapers?’ ”
In Silicon Valley, the tale of this love rectangle has been interpreted in various ways. To some young wives of tech billionaires, it’s about locking arms to support a clan member, declaring that they won’t stand for the same treatment. To other observers, it’s a parable about the perils of an atmosphere perhaps too casual about office dating. And to yet others, it’s about the danger inherent in data sets, when the data includes too much information about one’s mortality. If Brin had never learned about his Parkinson’s risk, he might never have had what a friend of the couple’s characterizes as an emotional crisis and strayed from his wife. (But had Wojcicki not helped him discover his risk for contracting the disease, he might not have enacted the healthy lifestyle choices that may prolong his life.)
Wojcicki is said to be dealing with the separation well, though she has been distracted by enormous problems at her company—the F.D.A. shut down part of 23andMe’s operations in late November, forcing the company to stop providing health-related test results to its customers. Some powerful players, like the American Medical Association, are demanding that she loop in physicians. Many of Wojcicki’s competitors, feeling the heat, have agreed to do so, but she has refused.
According to people who know her, she doesn’t want a divorce. Though the couple has a pre-nup, there’s more than enough money to go around, and she wouldn’t want to deal with courts and custody battles. She still owns the patent that might be the key to creating a drug to treat Brin.
For his part, Barra recently even made a kind gesture toward Rosenberg and reposted her essay about depression on his own social-media page. “Good to see you’re the better man, taking the high road here. Water under the bridge, man,” wrote a member of his Google+ circle. Rosenberg continues to be active on social media. Her friends and followers piped up recently when she dyed her hair blond. “That’s going to cause a double take,” one of her friends wrote. Another added, “Beautiful as always.”
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