Sergey Brin, a co-founder of Google, has filed for divorce from his wife of four years, alleging “irreconcilable disagreements” in court papers. The couple has been apart since December.
According to Insider, the world’s seventh richest man, worth $93 billion, discreetly filed for divorce from lawyer and businesswoman Nicole Shanahan in January.
Papers filed by the billionaire businessman claim that specifics of the couple’s assets and how they would be distributed ‘are to be established.’
The 48-year-old cited “irreconcilable issues” as the basis for the breakup, stating that he and Shanahan, whom he secretly married in November 2018, had been apart since December 15.
Brin and Shanahan, who is well-known for his secrecy, have a daughter, who was born in 2018, and the Google founder has requested joint custody of her as part of the divorce proceedings.
He has not, however, asked Shanahan for child support and has asked that she not get it in the future.
Brin’s divorce from Shanahan is his second; the Stanford-educated computer tycoon divorced his first wife, businesswoman Anne Wojcicki, with whom he had two children, in 2015.
The software billionaire and Shanahan, who started dating in 2015 shortly after his first divorce was finalized, married in secret on November 7, 2018, and only revealed the news to the world in October of the following year.
Brin and Shanahan made their romance public in 2016, when they made their red carpet debut as a pair at the Met Gala with Google co-founder Sergey Brin’s ex-wife Wojcicki and her then-boyfriend Alex Rodriguez.
Before meeting the groom, Shanahan was a well-known Silicon Valley figure, having started the patent management and valuation firm ClearAccessIP in 2013.
She was also designated a Code X fellow at The Stanford Center for Legal Informatics the following year.
Shanahan majored in Asian Studies at the University of Puget Sound and went on to law school at Santa Clara University following graduation.
She also studied international commerce at the National University of Singapore’s post-law school and the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies shortly before starting at SCU.