Nicole Shanahan
Nicole Ann Shanahan (born September 26, 1985)[1] is an American attorney who is involved in the technology industry. She is the running mate of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in his 2024 independent presidential campaign.
Nicole Shanahan
Born in California, Shanahan graduated from the University of Puget Sound and the Santa Clara University School of Law.[2] Before law school, Shanahan worked as a paralegal and then as a patent specialist at the defensive patent aggregator RPX Corp.[2][3] She was a fellow at Stanford Law School's CodeX, Stanford Center for Legal Informatics.[4][5][6]
Shanahan married Google co-founder Sergey Brin in 2018; they separated in 2021 and divorced in 2023.[7][8][9] She established the private foundation, Bia-Echo,[10] in 2019.[11]
In March 2024, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. named Shanahan as his vice presidential running mate.[12] Shanahan has stated she is "not an anti-vaxxer" but has questioned scientific consensus on vaccine safety and efficacy.[12][13][14]
Early life[edit]
Shanahan was born in Placer County, California, on September 26, 1985.[1] She grew up in Oakland, California.[2] In a 2023 interview with People magazine, Shanahan said she had a "very hard" childhood marked by traumatic experiences and poverty.[2][13] Shanahan described her father, an American of German and Irish descent who died in 2014, as a person who suffered from bipolar disorder and schizophrenia and struggled with substance abuse.[2] [13] [15] Shanahan's mother was born in China and emigrated to the United States from Guangzhou City in the 1980s.[16] She worked as a maid before becoming an accountant.[4][2][17]
Shanahan attended Saint Mary's College High School before moving to Washington state,[4][18] where she earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Puget Sound. Studying Asian studies, economics, and Mandarin Chinese,[2] Shanahan worked as a paralegal and patent specialist (the latter role at defensive patent aggregator RPX Corp.) before attending Santa Clara University School of Law where she graduated with a J.D. in 2014.[2][3][5]
Career[edit]
While in law school, Shanahan was an exchange student at National University of Singapore.[11] She became interested in patent law as a law student; after becoming a lawyer, she founded a Palo Alto-based legal tech company, ClearAccessIP, and was its CEO.[5][3] She sold the company to a competitor, IPwe, in 2020.[11][3]
Shanahan has spoken about the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on law and the legal profession.[19] She was a fellow at Stanford Law School's CodeX, Stanford Center for Legal Informatics.[4][5][6]
In 2022, Shanahan served as executive producer for the films Kiss The Ground in 2020, and Evolver.[20][21]
She is a member of the board of Carbon Royalty Corp.[22] Shanahan invested in Linus Biotechnology, Inc. (LinusBio), a biotech firm, during a venture funding round in January 2023.[23] In 2023, she joined the board of Extreme Tech Challenge.[24] She is the "Global Joy Officer" and a member of the board at the Sloomoo Institute.[25]
Bia-Echo and advocacy[edit]
In 2018, Shanahan helped fund and launch the Center for Female Reproductive Longevity and Equality within the Buck Institute for Research on Aging.[26]
In 2019,[11] she established her private foundation, Bia-Echo.[10] The foundation is named after Bia, the ancient Greek goddess associated with energy.[4] According to financial disclosure documents over a three-year period, Bia-Echo's sole donor was Shanahan's then-husband, Sergey Brin.[15] In 2020,[15] Brin donated at least $23 million in shares of Alphabet (Google's parent company) to Bia-Echo.[15][27] He made another contribution to the foundation in 2021, but did not make a contribution in 2022.[15] In 2022, the Bia-Echo Foundation reported owning $13.7 million in government securities and $12.2 million in stocks and bonds, and reported making $0 in grants or contributions to outside groups.[15]
In 2019, Shanahan pledged to contribute $100 million through Bia-Echo over five years,[28] mostly for "reproductive longevity" research, which aims to help women become pregnant later in life).[11][28][29][a] Shanahan has repeatedly criticized in vitro fertilization (calling IVF "one of the biggest lies that's being told about women's health today") and championed unconventional research that she believes might allow women to have children into their 50s (suggesting, for example, that exposure to sunlight might aid fertility).[29]
In a 2023 interview, Shanahan said that finding a "cure to autism" was an additional focus of Bia-Echo, and estimated that she spent 60% of her time researching autism.[15]
In 2022, Shanahan gave $70 million to Blue Meridian Partners, which makes grants to nonprofits that aim to help the impoverished.[32]
Political contributions and involvement before 2024[edit]
In the 2010s and 2020s, Shanahan made various contributions to left-leaning organizations and Democratic political candidates,[11] including Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign and the congressional campaigns of Ro Khanna.[15] In 2020, Shanahan was a "major donor" for Measure J, a criminal justice reform referendum in Los Angeles County.[33] In the same year, she contributed $150,000 to support George Gascón in his challenge to incumbent Los Angeles County District Attorney Jackie Lacey.[34]
During the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries, Shanahan contributed $2,800 each to the campaigns of Marianne Williamson and Pete Buttigieg.[10] She co-hosted a fundraiser for Buttigieg in December 2019, along with other wealthy Silicon Valley figures.[10][35] After Joe Biden became the presumptive nominee, she supported the Biden presidential campaign, contributing $25,000 to the Biden Victory Fund,[10][7] and a five-figure sum to the Democratic National Committee.[15]
Role in Robert F. Kennedy Jr. presidential campaign[edit]
Early role in campaign[edit]
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.[7][8] Through Planeta Management LLC,[15] Shanahan 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.[7] 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[8] or (according to the super PAC's co-founder) $7 million.[7][36] 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.[8][36] Kennedy later apologized to members of his family who were offended by the super PAC's ad (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 ad, as coordination between independent expenditure groups and campaigns is prohibited by law.[10][36]
Shanahan separately donated (also through Planeta Management LLC), a half-million dollars to a different super PAC supporting the Kennedy campaign.[15]
Vice presidential running mate[edit]
In March 2024, Kennedy's campaign manager and daughter-in-law, Amaryllis Fox Kennedy, confirmed reports that Shanahan was on the candidate's "short list" of potential running mates.[37] The campaign considered other candidates as well, such as Aaron Rodgers and Jesse Ventura.[8][38] On March 26, 2024, Kennedy formally announced Shanahan was his selection for vice president during a campaign event in Oakland, California.[39] The ticket is running against incumbent President Joe Biden (a Democrat) and former President Donald Trump (a Republican), who had both became the presumptive nominees of their parties before Kennedy announced Shanahan as his running mate. Shanahan left the Democratic Party when she joined the ticket.[15] Shanahan's prospective ability to bankroll the RFK Jr. campaign were seen as an advantage for the campaign.[15][40] She is the richest candidate for vice president in at least 50 years, with a net worth possibly in the hundreds of millions of dollars.[41]
Shanahan has said that she is "not an anti-vaxxer" but has expressed support for Kennedy's anti-vaccine advocacy and questions the scientific consensus on their safety and efficacy.[13][12] After being selected as Kennedy's running mate, Shanahan made controversial comments about the causes of autism and her concern that "here in the state of California, it is 1 in 22. 1 in 22 children affected."[42] Just before that comment, she said “pharmaceutical medicine” was one of “three main causes” of an “epidemic of chronic disease,” adding that “no single safety study can assess the cumulative impact of one prescription on top of another prescription and one shot on top of another shot on top of another shot throughout the course of childhood.”[42]
Shanahan also said she believed that "electromagnetic pollution" from mobile phones and other devices were contributing to an "epidemic of chronic disease"[40] and that Kennedy was the only presidential candidate who "takes the chronic disease epidemic seriously."[15]
Personal life[edit]
In 2013, Shanahan married Jeremy Asher Kranz, a San Francisco Bay Area investor[3] and finance executive;[43] they divorced in 2015.[44]
Shanahan met Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, in the summer of 2014, at a yoga festival in Lake Tahoe;[7] they married in 2018.[7][8] They have a daughter together,[2] born in 2018.[28] Brin and Shanahan maintained an estate at Point Dume in Malibu, California, purchased in 2020.[45]
Shanahan and Brin separated in December 2021,[2][46] and Brin filed for divorce in January 2022.[46] In 2022, the Wall Street Journal reported that a reason for the breakup was a "brief affair" in 2021 between Shanahan and Elon Musk.[46][43] Shanahan[2] and Musk have denied the report.[47] The Wall Street Journal said: "We are confident in our sourcing, and we stand by our reporting."[2] 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.[43] The divorce was finalized in 2023 in a confidential arbitration.[7][8][48] Forbes reported that Shanahan likely received around 2.6 million Alphabet Class B shares from Brin, worth $390 million in March 2024, and possibly received an additional, equal amount of Class C shares.[41]
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.[49] The pair met at the Burning Man festival in summer 2022.[49][50]