The billionaire co-founder of Google, Sergey Brin, made two gifts of Alphabet stock valued at a total of $126.5 million on Monday, according to an SEC filing. Alphabet is Google’s parent company.
The filing does not name the nonprofits that received the money. However, citing an anonymous source, Forbes reported that the donations went to the Sergey Brin Family Foundation and the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research. Each nonprofit received stock valued at nearly $63.3 million, according to the SEC filing. A representative for Brin did not respond to a request to confirm the two nonprofits.
Brin, whose net worth is estimated at nearly $100 billion, has given extensively and regularly to both nonprofits over the past decade.
He created his family foundation in 2015 and, along with his parents and brother, uses the roughly $4.4 billion grant maker to support education, social-justice efforts, Parkinson’s disease research, and other causes. The family foundation awarded more than $228.3 million in grant money to nonprofits in those fields and others last year.
His gift to Fox’s foundation was one of multiple contributions he has awarded to the research organization, which was established in 2000 by the actor Michael J. Fox, who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 1991 when he was 29.
Supporting Parkinson’s research has long been a personal pursuit for Brin. Both his mother and an aunt were diagnosed with Parkinson’s, and Brin carries a Parkinson’s-related mutation of the LRRK2 gene.
He has said he feels fortunate be able to support Parkinson’s research.
“Until the fountain of youth is discovered, all of us will have some conditions in our old age, only we don’t know what they will be,” wrote Brin in a 2011 blog post. “I have a better guess than almost anyone else for what ills may be mine, and I have decades to prepare for it,”
Brin has been giving huge sums to charity for the past decade and has appeared on the Chronicle’s annual Philanthropy 50 list of the biggest donors seven times since 2011.
