55 Things You Need to Know About Nicole Shanahan

Nicole Shanahan is a wild card.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s vice presidential pick doesn’t have the kind of public persona typically associated with politicians. She’s not a frequent-flier on cable news, barely has a social media presence and is interested in some niche policy issues, like reproductive senescence, regenerative agriculture and gut biomes.

But what Shanahan, 38, has is an abundance of wealth (which will come in handy as Kennedy mounts an expensive cross-country ballot access effort) and a powerful rags-to-riches story that many politicians would gleefully milk in advertisements.

Raised on welfare in a single-parent household in Oakland, California, the daughter of a Chinese immigrant, Shanahan went from a successful career as a patent lawyer and entrepreneur to marrying into uber-wealth after meeting Google co-founder Sergey Brin at a yoga festival. The two divorced in 2022, amid reports that she had had an affair with Brin’s friend and fellow tech titan, Elon Musk. (Shanahan and Musk deny the allegations.)

Like so many others who have amassed a fortune from the tech sector, Shanahan has become a philanthropic force but also a political player. She was the leading donor behind Kennedy’s unexpected Super Bowl ad in February and emerged as the top contender for Kennedy’s vice presidential pick after a few days of speculation that NFL quarterback Aaron Rodgers was in the running.

Here, compiled from her public remarks, profiles and her own philanthropic activity is the definitive primer on Nicole Shanahan.

1.

Shanahan was raised in Oakland. She told People Magazine that she lived through “times of chaos” during childhood. Her father struggled to find work and suffered from bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. Her mother emigrated from Guangzhou City in the 1980s, a beneficiary of China’s “Open Door Policy.”

2.

“I grew up in a single parent household,” she said. “My mother raised my brother and I. We were low income and on welfare.” Shanahan has said she remembers her mother being ashamed to use food stamps and asking her and brother to leave the store so they wouldn’t see her.

3.

For a time growing up, she had only two T-shirts that fit.

4.

She said “school was one of the only reliable things that I had in my life.”

5.

Shanahan’s mother worked as an accountant in the Bay Area. “Her legacy is about that immigrant, swallow the pain and do your best with what you have,” Shanahan said of her mom. “That white-knuckle approach to life is extremely hard, but it’s also effective.”

6.

At 12, Shanahan bused tables at a local burger restaurant. At 15, she was a hostess at a nicer restaurant. “I would unpack my tips envelope in front of my mom,” she said, “and she was blown away by how much was coming out.”

7.

Inspired by commercials on television, Shanahan said that at age 12 she had “decided … that I was definitely going to become a patent lawyer.”

8.

“[But] it was the internet that made my dream of becoming a lawyer a reality, from helping me submit college applications to assisting me with school projects and applying for my first legal internship,” she has said. “Without the internet I would probably still be in Oakland doing the same thing I was doing at age 12.”

9.

She attended the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington, on an “enormous merit scholarship,” where she studied Asian Studies, Economics and Mandarin Chinese and participated in varsity cross country.

10.

She also received a certificate in World Trade Organization Studies from the Geneva Graduate Institute in Switzerland before working on patents.

11.

One of Shanahan’s male co-workers at RPX Corp., a patent company where she worked in her mid-20s, sexually assaulted her, she told San Francisco Magazine. Not long afterward she left the company and developed severe depression.

12.

“My biggest regret today is that I didn’t report what had happened because it wasn’t until almost 10 years later that I learned the same co-worker had continued to do this with other female employees at the company,” she said of her time at RPX Corp. (RPX Corp. told San Francisco Magazine in 2021 it was investigating the matter.)

13.

Shanahan is a 2014 graduate of Santa Clara Law School in Silicon Valley. The school focuses on the intersection between technology and the law. Around the time of her graduation she started ClearAccess IP, a company that used artificial intelligence to streamline the patent process.

14.

While in law school Shanahan also spent time abroad studying intellectual property and Chinese law at the National University of Singapore.

15.

In 2015, Shanahan divorced from Jeremy Asher Kranz, a Bay Area investor, after two years of marriage. They had no children.

16.

Shanahan married Sergey Brin, a co-founder of Google and a billionaire, in 2018, after meeting him at a yoga festival in Lake Tahoe. They have a daughter, Echo, who was born the same year.

17.

Shanahan and Brin divorced in 2022. According to the Wall Street Journal, Shanahan had an affair with Elon Musk, precipitating the divorce and ending a long friendship between Brin and Musk.

18.

Musk called the allegations “total bs.”

19.

Shanahan said “Did Elon and I have sex, like it was a moment of passion, and then it was over? No. … Did we have a romantic relationship? No. We didn’t have an affair.” She said she had been speaking with Musk about how she might use technology developed by his Neuralink company — which is creating an implantable brain-computer interface — to help her daughter who has autism.

20.

In divorce proceedings, which were finalized in 2023, Shanahan sought over $1 billion from Brin. The final division of assets was settled in confidential arbitration.

21.

Shanahan's favorite TV show is Netflix's “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.” Her favorite band is the Talking Heads.

22.

Shanahan hasn’t posted since 2017 on her X account.

23.

Shanahan has talked openly about the struggles she faced being the wife of a billionaire and being around extreme wealth. “It’s nearly impossible to have mega wealth and be deeply grounded.”

24.

“When I was living as a wife of a billionaire, I was not the best version of myself,” she said. “I felt conflicted every day, like I couldn’t access the thing that made me what I am.”

25.

Shanahan “loves making headdresses and has a special affinity for Native American culture.”

26.

Shanahan also enjoys “yoga, paddle boarding, snowboarding, swimming, running, cooking, meditation and kite boarding.”

27.

She has described herself as a “progressive through and through.”

28.

She has donated over $250,000 to different criminal justice reform efforts in California over the past decade.

29.

In particular, she was a major donor toward Measure J in Los Angeles County, a ballot initiative that passed in 2020 and will require more funds to be diverted away from the carceral system and toward “community programs and alternatives to incarceration”.

30.

She has said that having a mental health professional at the scene of George Floyd’s death would have possibly de-escalated the situation and saved his life.

31.

She is the president of the Bia-Echo Foundation, which invests in reproductive longevity and equality, criminal justice reform and a healthy and livable planet, according to the foundation’s website.

32.

Some of Bia-Echo’s funding comes from Brin. He gave $23 million in stock to the foundation in 2019, according to tax filings.

33.

Shanahan, who struggled with infertility, has invested heavily in the Bucks Institute Center for Female Reproductive Longevity and Equality through Bia-Echo. She has pledged $100 million toward research in reproductive longevity to the Bucks Institute and other entities.

34.

The center is focused on understanding the molecular basis of “ovarian aging, including impaired DNA repair, metabolic/energetic disorders, and mitochondrial dysfunction.”

35.

She told a panel on population pressures at COP 26 in Glasgow, Scotland, that “we have around 60 years of science that is missing around reproductive senescence” and that soil health and gut biome (which she says are interrelated) are critical to increasing reproductive longevity.

36.

Shanahan is also interested in regenerative agriculture and carbon sequestration. Through Bia-Echo she’s supported organizations like Kiss the Ground and Iowa State University Foundation’s Prairie Strips Project.

37.

“In essence, I’m in a career transition to becoming a farmer, and I won’t lie, it’s a big educational curve,” she said in 2021.

38.

Autism research is another major interest of Shanahan’s. She said she spends more than 60 percent of her time doing research on the topic and talking with scientists.

39.

She’s donated to the University of California Davis Mind Institute, which does research and provides care for individuals with autism and other neurodevelopmental conditions.

40.

Shanahan has worked as a producer on two films. The short film “Evolver” in 2022 (a virtual reality experience that explores “the landscape of the body”) and "Kiss the Ground," a 2020 film that advocates for restoring the world’s soils.

41.

She has donated to Democratic politicians such as Hillary Clinton in 2016, Joe Biden in 2020, Pete Buttigieg in 2020, and her local Congressman Democrat Ro Khanna, along with a slew of Democratic politicians across the country.

42.

In 2020, Shanahan co-hosted a fundraiser for Buttigieg. And she also supported Marianne Williamson’s long-shot 2020 bid. She donated $25,000 to the Biden Victory Fund in 2020.

43.

Shanahan’s first donation to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was $6,600 in May 2023.

44.

"In my opinion, he is the best presidential candidate we have on the issues close to my heart: environmental health, regenerative agriculture and social justice,” she said of her support for his candidacy.

45.

Shanahan said she is “not an anti-vaxxer,” but that “I do wonder about vaccine injuries.”

46.

Shanahan said she had initially soured on Kennedy after he pulled out of the Democratic primary to run as an independent, but turned back toward him at the beginning of the year.

47.

In February, Shanahan contributed $4 million to American Values 2024, a pro-Kennedy Super PAC, to help fund a retro Super Bowl ad that linked Kennedy with his uncle, John F. Kennedy. The ad sparked blowback from the Kennedy family.

48.

Shanahan was closely involved with the creative process behind the ad, reaching out to ad-makers in New York and consulting with lawyers about trademark concerns.

49.

“When you start with very little, you have so much opportunity to chart a path toward excellence,” she said during a question and answer session on entrepreneurship in 2021. “When you don’t have outside structures telling you how things should be, your creative capacity is unlimited.”

50.

She said at the 2022 Gold Gala that “I really want to start packaging more and more wide-scale carbon drawdown, and highlighting it with really fun media so we all start feeling really excited about our prospects on this planet.”

51.

While a fellow at Stanford University with CodeX, she developed the theory of “Coasean mapping,” a theory on the pace and nature of society’s adoption of artificial intelligence for law and government based on the work of Ronald Coase, a British economist and lawyer.

52.

At Stanford she also helped develop the “Smart Prosecution Project,” an effort to put criminal justice data online to make it easier to analyze the data. “When you have the ability to ask questions of the database, you can think about policy completely differently.”

53.

In May 2023, Shanahan had a commitment ceremony with Jacob Strumwasser, a tech executive involved with a bitcoin startup. She met Strumwasser at the Burning Man festival in Nevada. They bonded over their shared love of surfing in Southern California.

54.

She said “I want to get the word out and assure everyone that I am committed as ever to dedicating my life’s work to social justice, climate solutions and a thoughtful, caring democracy.”

55.

“My goal was to become a middle-income American with financial stability doing something intellectually interesting, like patent law,” she said. “I think the bigness of my career choices has always come from the desire to pay back the unique opportunity this country provides.”