Do we like them?

Do we like Sergey Brin?

Our score: 7 out of 10. Good record on climate and same-sex marriage, held back by a political lurch rightward and one contested remark about the UN.

The big stoush is the billionaire tax. Fortune and Bloomberg reported he left California for Nevada before the 1 January residency deadline, bought a $42 million Lake Tahoe mansion, then became the biggest funder of the group fighting the tax. By August he'd put in $102 million, per Secretary of State data reported by the LA Times. A union official said he'd “rather spend $100 million to fund a shady opposition campaign”; his side calls the group nonpartisan and focused on affordability.

On the harm test, the record is better than you might fear. The New York Times, via Political Wire, reports he donated to the 2008 California campaign defending same-sex marriage and quietly started a nonprofit in 2021 that has spent at least $88 million on climate and environmental policy. We found nothing from him either way on trans people, and that's a gap, not a clean bill.

The most contested thing he's said: in an internal Google forum, first reported by the Washington Post, he called the UN “transparently antisemitic” after a report accused Google of profiting from Israel's actions in Gaza. He wrote that using the word genocide for Gaza is “deeply offensive to many Jewish people”. His spokesperson said it responded to a report he called plainly biased. Where you land depends on whether you read it as defending Jewish colleagues or as dismissing a human rights report.

Then there's the lurch. The NYT, via Political Wire, says he called Trump's 2016 win “deeply offensive” in leaked staff comments and joined a protest against the travel ban, but has since joined tech executives courting Trump. Fox News reports he gave Spencer Pratt, a Los Angeles mayoral candidate, the maximum $1,800 in May, and has praised the administration for “supporting our companies instead of fighting with them”. That's his own giving and words, not just company he keeps, and it's why the asterisk is there.

The rest of the picture is mixed in a good way. He returned to Google to work on Gemini after retiring, and when its image tool went wrong he said it “definitely, for good reasons, upset a lot of people” instead of dodging. In January he gave $20 million to a housing-focused group, though that is the same group that later fought the tax.

So where does that leave us? He isn't a culture-war grifter, and his history on same-sex marriage and climate is solid. But a billionaire spending over $100 million to defend billionaires' wallets, while edging toward Trump's camp, is not the Brin who rallied against the travel ban. Fine to like the search engine; keep one eye on where the money goes.