Nicole Shanahan facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Nicole Shanahan
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Shanahan in 2019
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| Born |
Nicole Ann Shanahan
September 16, 1985 |
| Education | University of Puget Sound (BA) Santa Clara University (JD) |
| Political party | Democratic (before 2024) Independent (2024–present) |
| Spouse(s) |
Jeremy Kranz
(m. 2013; div. 2015) |
Nicole Ann Shanahan (born September 16, 1985) is an American technologist, attorney, and running mate in Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s 2024 independent presidential campaign. Her candidacy for vice president was reported by Mediaite on March 16, 2024, and confirmed by Kennedy on March 26.
Shanahan was married to Google co-founder Sergey Brin from 2018 until their divorce in 2023.
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Early life
Shanahan grew up in Oakland, California, In a 2023 interview with People magazine, Shanahan said that she had a "very hard" childhood marked by traumatic experiences; she described her father, who died in 2014, as a sufferer of bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. She said that her mother, who was born in China worked as a maid before becoming an accountant.
Shanahan attended Saint Mary's College of California before moving to Washington state, where she received a bachelor's degree from the University of Puget Sound, where she studied Asian studies, economics, and Mandarin Chinese. Before law school, she worked as a paralegal and patent specialist, the latter role at defensive patent aggregator RPX Corp.
Career
Shanahan graduated from Santa Clara University School of Law in 2014. In law school, she was an exchange student at National University of Singapore. She became interested in patent law; after becoming a lawyer, she became the founder and CEO of legal tech company ClearAccessIP, based in Palo Alto. She sold the company to a competitor, IPwe, in 2020.
She has spoken on the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on law and the legal profession. She was a fellow at Stanford Law School's CodeX, Stanford Center for Legal Informatics.
Shanahan served as executive producer for the films Kiss The Ground in 2020, and Evolver in 2022.
Shanahan is a member of the board of Carbon Royalty Corp. She invested in Linus Biotechnology, Inc. (LinusBio), a biotech firm, during a venture funding round in January 2023. In 2023, she joined the board of Extreme Tech Challenge. She is the "Global Joy Officer" and a member of the board at the Sloomoo Institute.
Charitable contributions
In 2018, Shanahan helped fund and launch the Center for Female Reproductive Longevity and Equality within the Buck Institute for Research on Aging.
In 2019, she established her private foundation, Bia-Echo. The foundation is named after Bia, the ancient Greek goddess associated with energy. In 2022, Shanahan's then-husband, Sergey Brin, donated at least $23 million in shares of Alphabet (Google's parent company) to Bia-Echo. In 2019, Shanahan pledged to contribute $100 million over five years, mostly for research in reproductive longevity (programs that help women become pregnant later in life). Other beneficiaries of the contributions include programs that aim to overhaul the criminal justice system and climate change, as well as programs on nutrition.
In 2022, Shanahan gave $70 million to Blue Meridian Partners, which makes grants to nonprofits that aim to help the impoverished.
Political contributions and involvement
In the 2010s and 2020s, Shanahan made various contributions to left-leaning organizations and Democratic political candidates. In 2020, Shanahan was a "major donor" for Measure J, a criminal justice reform referendum in Los Angeles County. Also in 2020, Shanahan contributed $150,000 to support George Gascón in his challenge to incumbent Los Angeles County District Attorney Jackie Lacey.
During the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries, Shanahan contributed $2,800 each to the campaigns of Marianne Williamson and Pete Buttigieg. She co-hosted a fundraiser for Buttigieg in December 2019, along with other wealthy Silicon Valley figures. After Joe Biden became the presumptive nominee, she supported the Biden presidential campaign, contributing $25,000 to the Biden Victory Fund.
Role in Robert F. Kennedy Jr. presidential campaign
In May 2023, when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was challenging Biden for the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination, Shanahan donated the maximum of $6,600 to Kennedy's campaign. After Kennedy dropped out of the Democratic primaries in October 2023, instead announcing that he would run in the general election as an independent candidate, Shanahan said she was "incredibly disappointed" and would not support his run. In early 2024, however, Shanahan reversed course, and resumed backing Kennedy's candidacy. She donated $4 million to a super PAC to pay for a 30-second television Super Bowl ad, aired during Super Bowl LVIII, supporting the campaign. In addition to funding the ad's broadcast, Shanahan was also a "creative force" behind the ad, the total cost of which was variously said to be $5 million or (according to the super PAC's co-founder) $7 million. Numerous Kennedy family members have denounced his campaign, and criticized the Super Bowl ad for reusing footage from a 1960 presidential campaign ad supporting John F. Kennedy. Kennedy later apologized to members of his family who were offended by the ad, but ultimately defended and stood by the ad campaign—saying "I'm so sorry if the Super Bowl advertisement caused anyone in my family pain"—while also saying that his campaign was not directly involved with the super PAC's ad, as coordination between independent expenditure groups and campaigns is prohibited by law.
On March 16, 2024 Mediaite reported she would be Kennedy's pick for vice president. The following day, Kennedy's campaign manager and daughter-in-law, Amaryllis Fox Kennedy, said that Shanahan was on the candidate's "short list" of potential running mates. The campaign has considered other candidates as well, such as Aaron Rodgers and Jesse Ventura. Kennedy confirmed on March 26 that Shanahan was his selection for vice president during an Oakland, CA campaign event.
Personal life
In 2013, Shanahan married Jeremy Asher Kranz, a San Francisco Bay Area investor and finance executive. They divorced in 2015.
Shanahan met Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, in the summer of 2014, at a yoga festival in Lake Tahoe. They married in 2018. They have a daughter together, born in 2018. Brin and Shanahan maintained an estate at Point Dume in Malibu, California, purchased in 2020.
Shanahan and Brin separated in December 2021, and Brin filed for divorce in January 2022. Shanahan and Brin had signed a prenuptial agreement. During the divorce proceedings, Shanahan's attorneys argued that she had signed the prenuptial agreement under duress, and in mediation sought more than $1 billion of Brin's $95 billion fortune. The divorce was finalized in 2023. In 2022, the Wall Street Journal reported that a reason for the breakup was a "brief affair" in 2021 between Shanahan and Elon Musk. Shanahan and Musk have denied the report.
In 2023, Shanahan held a "love ceremony" of commitment with Jacob Strumwasser, who is an advisor at Lightning Labs, a bitcoin software company. She described the event as a handfasting ceremony influenced by Druidic tradition. The pair met at the Burning Man festival in summer 2022.
