Robert F. Kennedy’s new running mate, Nicole Shanahan, 38, has the best American rags-to-riches story.
The lawyer, tech entrepreneur, philanthropist and mother of one grew up on welfare with a Chinese immigrant mother and father who were diagnosed with bipolar schizophrenia.
She persevered through her tumultuous upbringing to earn her law degree, start a company worth millions in her 20s, launch a foundation, and now be considered for the second most powerful position in the world.
But before she transitioned into politics, Shanahan was known for her role in an alleged love triangle involving two of the world’s richest men: her ex-husband and Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who was ranked No. 10 in the list. Bloomberg Billionaires Indexand Elon Musk, who is currently ranked No. 3.
She has since moved on with her partner Jacob Strumwasser, whom she got engaged to in a “love ceremony” last summer, posing in a giant floral dress. for a People magazine spread.
Robert F. Kennedy officially named Nicole Shanahan as his running mate on Tuesday. The 38-year-old lawyer founded a company when she was 20, but she is best known for an alleged love triangle between two of the richest men in the world.
Nicole Shanahan poses for the cover of Modern Luxury in 2021
Shanahan’s grandfather was a landowner in Macoa and his grandmother worked in a factory in China “and because of the communist revolution they met,” he explained when he returned to his college alma mater, the University of Puget Sound, based in Tacoma, Washington. in 2021. .
His mother, he said, had to overcome a father who believed that “a son was more valuable than a daughter.”
“To the point where he pressured my grandmother to keep having children until she had a son,” Shanahan said. ‘She never did. She had five daughters.
However, in a way, his grandfather raised his mother to be a “son.”
He said his mother was a housekeeper before becoming an accountant and did not come to the United States until she was 30.
Two years later, Shanahan was born.
“My father was not well,” he said. We were on very low incomes and on welfare.’
Nicole Shanahan (left) poses with her now ex-husband Sergey Brin (right), the billionaire co-founder of Google.
“I had a very hard childhood, with a lot of sadness, fear and instability,” he said. People Magazine last year.. “Sometimes there was violence.”
Shanahan said he was able to pay for the University of Puget Sound thanks to a UPS merit scholarship.
“Actually, I hadn’t even visited the campus before my move-in date because we didn’t have funds to visit colleges,” he recalled.
The future lawyer studied Asian studies, economics and Mandarin Chinese and took some science classes, “which I wasn’t very good at here,” she said in her appearance at the university. “But you still let me take those classes.”
He graduated in 2007 and headed to Switzerland, where he received a certificate in WTO studies, and Singapore for a law student exchange while pursuing his JD at Santa Clara University. She spent time working as a paralegal.
She said of her grandfather: “He was very proud.” She didn’t really understand why I decided to go to law school, but she really liked the idea.
She started her company, ClearAccessIP, when I was still in law school.
Nicole Shanahan (right) and her ex Sergey Brin on a red carpet in Los Angeles in 2021
In a 2015 interview with MogulShanahan said the ClearAccessIP idea was “hypothetical” and he put it into practice after working at several law firms and then at a licensing company.
“The more time I spent on patent data, the more I realized the value of aggregating it and creating standard analysis processes around patented technology,” he said.
Shanahan added: “I’ve always been attracted to the concept that you can possess an idea and that ideas can lead to people coming together to build something, and that something can potentially change the course of human history.”
In the same interview, she revealed that the three people from history she would like to meet were fashion designer Coco Chanel, Ayn Rand – one of libertarians’ favorite writers – and Alan Turing, whose Turing test was used in machines to see if they could exhibit intelligent behavior.
And in the light-hearted Q&A session, he talked about his funniest and most romantic dates.
She had married Bay Area investor Jeremy Asher Kranz in 2013, but the couple divorced in 2015.
That was the same year that the very active Shanahan, whose hobbies are rowing, snowboarding, swimming, running and yoga, met Brin at a yoga festival in Lake Tahoe.
Nicole Shanahan (left) and Sergey Brin (right) in New York City in 2016
Both had ties to Stanford, as Shanahan became a Stanford CodeX Fellow at Stanford’s prestigious Center for Legal Informatics in 2014.
‘We fell in love at Stanford, wandering around campus and talking about quantum physics,’ she told People in 2023. ‘He showed me the areas he frequented when he was there as a master’s student and where he created Google with Page Larry!’
“I was living in a fairy tale. He was magical. So it seemed like we could really solve a lot of the world’s problems with technology,” she said.
Brin and Shanahan quietly tied the knot in 2018 and kept their nuptials a secret until 2019, after the birth of their daughter Echo.
Since Echo’s birth, Shanahan has been open about her fertility struggles, although she has also criticized the IVF option, saying it was “irresponsibly selling out.”
He said the money should go toward the goal of extending women’s fertility into their 50s, and he has since committed millions to that cause.
“And I’ve tried to imagine where we would be as a field if all the money that has been invested in IVF and all the money that has been invested in commercializing IVF and all the government money that has been invested in subsidizing IVF.” “If 10 percent of that amount went to reproductive longevity, research and fundamental research, where would we be today?” he said in a 2021 interview.
In 2018, Shanahan committed $6 million to launch the Buck Institute’s Center for Female Longevity and Reproductive Equality.
A year later, he launched the Bia-Echo Foundation, which focuses on three goals: longevity and reproductive equality, criminal justice reform, and the environment, and committed another $7.4 million to the Buck Institute center.
In 2020, he sold ClearAccessIP to dedicate his time to the Bia-Echo Foundation.
In the 2023 People interview, he talked about how he never got used to being among the mega-rich.
“When I was living as the wife of a billionaire, I wasn’t the best version of myself,” she reflected. “I felt conflicted every day, like I couldn’t access the thing that made me who I am.”
“I couldn’t access that 5-year-old girl who had to figure out how to turn a 30-year-old baseball glove into something she could go to softball with,” he said. “I was the girl who had endless optimism and tenacity and that fight, because I’m a fighter, and I didn’t know how to change the subject. I tried for years. I looked around for examples of how I could adapt to this new style of life.’
The couple separated in 2021, Brin filed for divorce in June 2022, and then in July 2022, she became an object of public fascination.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Shanahan and Musk had a brief affair that led Brin to file for divorce earlier that year and the two billionaires to end their long friendship.
Both Shanahan and Musk have vehemently denied that they were ever romantic, while the Wall Street Journal continues to support the report.
Shanahan told People that she and Musk had a conversation about autism, after Echo was diagnosed as being on the spectrum, and then she was “internationally shamed for being a cheater.”
‘Elon and I had sex, like it was a moment of passion, and then it was over? No,’ she said. ‘Did we have a romantic relationship? No. We didn’t have any adventures.
It’s unclear exactly how much Shanahan took away from the split, as the couple reportedly owned a huge estate in Malibu, formerly owned by singer Pink, a penthouse in Manhattan, and several properties in Silicon Valley. and a 240-foot superyacht called Dragonfly.
More recently, he was able to shell out more than $4 million to the Kennedy-aligned super PAC American Values 2024 to help fund the independent candidate’s Super Bowl ad.
Shanahan met Jacob Strumwasser at Burning Man during the summer of 2022 and held a ‘love ceremony’ in May.
In the midst of her divorce from Brin and as Google search results for Shanahan’s name continued to romantically link her to Musk, the Bay Area lawyer went to Burning Man and met her current partner, Strumwasser, through a friend .
“It seems like we were living parallel lives in surfing, and then we met at Burning Man, which is the driest place on the planet, and we talked about how much we missed surfing,” he told People in July. “I feel very lucky, it’s lovely.”
In May they held a ‘love ceremony’ instead of a traditional wedding.
‘There is a beach that he and I are very connected to, where we surfed independently many times before we met and then surfed together on an early date,” he said. “We fell in love with surfing there and did a love blessing ceremony with water that we collected from that beach.”
They then headed to their property in Southern California.
“It was spontaneous with some friends,” he told People. ‘We didn’t know who would end up there, but we had a handful of friends and a friend who believes in water magic gave us a water blessing. It was beautiful.’