• Most of tech's most powerful CEOs are married. 
• Not everyone is coupled up — Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have girlfriends, while Jack Dorsey and Tim Cook appear to be single. 
• But for those who are married, many of them have been with their spouses for years or even decades. 
• Here's a look at the lives of the spouses of tech's biggest CEOs. 
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

It takes a special type of person to become the partner of a high-powered tech executive: From long weeks at work to intense stress, the spouses of CEOs have probably seen it all. 

Like most other industries, many of the top executives in tech are partnered up. Not all of them are married — Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Apple CEO Tim Cook appear to be single, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has an on again, off again relationship with singer Grimes, and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is newly divorced and back in the dating game. 

But top executives at companies like Google, Facebook, IBM, Alibaba, and Microsoft are all married — some of them for decades. 

Here's a look at the lives of the spouses of some of tech's richest and most successful executives. 

Priscilla Chan

Partner: Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook

Years married: Seven

Who she is: Priscilla Chan is a pediatrician and co-CEO of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Chan graduated from Harvard University with a degree in biology and attended the University of California, San Francisco, for medical school. She worked at San Francisco General Hospital as a pediatrician after finishing her residency in 2015, but has since left to manage the daily operations of CZI. Chan is also cofounder of The Primary School, a private school that offers free healthcare and education to low-income children in the Palo Alto area. 

Chan and Zuckerberg met in line for the bathroom at a Harvard frat party in 2003 and married in 2012, right around the time Chan graduated from medical school and Facebook went public. The couple has two daughters together, Max and August. 

Laurene Powell Jobs

Partner: Steve Jobs, former CEO of Apple

Years married: 20, until Jobs' death in 2011

Who she is: Laurene Powell Jobs is a philanthropist and the founder of Emerson Collective, an organization focused on social change. Powell Jobs attended University of Pennsylvania, majoring in economics and political science, and worked at Goldman Sachs before getting her MBA at Stanford University. 

After Steve Jobs' death, Powell Jobs inherited his wealth, mostly in the form of Apple and Disney stock — today, she is currently worth $24.5 billion, according to Forbes. Powell Jobs is an active philanthropist, with a focus on education and the environment. Through Emerson Collective, she has funded news organizations like ProPublica, acquired media properties like Pop-Up Magazine and The Atlantic, of which she has a majority stake, and invested in Axios and the podcast giant Gimlet Media. She is also an avid contemporary art collector and has a multi-million-dollar yacht called the Venus as well as a $16.5 million home in San Francisco.  

Powell Jobs met Steve Jobs in 1989, when she was seated next to him at an event he'd been invited to speak at on campus. The couple had three children together: Reed, Erin, and Eve. 

Dennis Troper

Partner: Susan Wojcicki, CEO of YouTube

Years married: 21

Who he is: Dennis Troper is also an executive at Google — he currently serves as director of product management for Wear OS, the company's smartwatch operating system. He's been at Google since 2003. Troper got his bachelor's degree at the University of Texas at Austin and his master's at UC Santa Cruz. 

Troper and Wojcicki's house in Menlo Park was the birthplace of Google: the couple rented out their garage and two bedrooms to Sergey Brin and Larry Page when the company was starting out. 

Troper and Wojcicki now have five kids together.

Miranda Kerr

Partner: Evan Spiegel, founder and CEO of Snap

Years married: Two

Who she is: Miranda Kerr is an Australian model and the founder and CEO of Kora Organics, a company that makes beauty products using natural ingredients. Kerr began as a runway model before landing a contract with Maybelline and, later, Victoria's Secret and Clinique. 

Kerr and Spiegel met in 2015 at a dinner by Louis Vuitton in Los Angeles. The night they met, Harper's Bazaar editor-in-chief Glenda Bailey said to Kerr, "I bet you two are going to get married." The couple tied the knot in a top-secret ceremony in May 2017, and now have two sons together, Hart and Myles. Kerr also has a son, Flynn, from her previous marriage to Orlando Bloom. 

Melinda Gates

Partner: Bill Gates, cofounder of Microsoft

Years married: 25

Who she is: Melinda Gates is an active philanthropist, most recently pledging $1 billion toward improving gender equality in the next 10 years. Along with her husband, Melinda founded the Gates Foundation, which if focused primarily on poverty and healthcare worldwide. In 2016, Melinda was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Obama. 

Gates attended Duke University, earning a bachelor's degree in both economics and computer science, as well as an MBA — all in five years. Gates was recruited by Microsoft as a product manager shortly after the company went public, and she eventually worked her way up through the ranks of the company. Gates had a high-powered role until she decided to leave when she got pregnant with their first child. 

The couple met in 1987 at a company picnic — when Bill Gates asked her out for a date two weeks from then, she initially turned him down. Eventually, they went on a date and were together for seven years before getting married in 1994 in a reported million-dollar ceremony.

The couple has three kids: Jennifer, Rory, and Phoebe. They share a home in Medina, Washington, that was last estimated to be worth $125 million, a luxury car collection, and a private plane. 

Mark Rometty

Partner: Ginni Rometty, CEO of IBM

Years married: 40

Who he is: Mark Rometty is famously private, and there's not a lot of information available about the IBM CEO's husband of four decades. Back in 2011, The New York Times reported that Mark Rometty was a principal investor in the Bam Oil Company, although it's unclear whether he's still with the company. 

But in 2015, Ginni Rometty did mention Mark in a commencement speech at Northwestern University, her alma mater. In the speech, Rometty described how Mark supported her early in her career and pushed her to take an opportunity when she was second-guessing herself.

The couple met early on in their careers, when they were training in the General Motors Institute. They split their time between New York and Bonita Springs, Florida, and like to go scuba diving together and see Broadway plays, according to The Times. 

Sydney Shapiro

Partner: Dara Khosrowshahi, CEO of Uber

Years married: Seven

Who she is: Sydney Shapiro is a former preschool teacher. Shapiro and Khosrowshahi met in 2008 when they were set up on a blind date. When Khosrowshahi arrived in a suit and driving a Volvo, Shapiro thought, "he's going to be this arrogant, egocentric, just ... douche," she told The New Yorker. Khosrowshahi surprised her by being funny and asking her a lot of questions, she said, and the couple got married in 2012 in Las Vegas while Shapiro was wearing a Slayer t-shirt. They now have twin sons, Hayes and Hugo. 

Lucy Southworth

Partner: Larry Page, cofounder of Google

Years married: 12 

Who she is: Lucy Southworth is a former research scientist. She attended University of Pennsylvania and has a master's from Oxford University. She was also a doctoral student at Stanford, according to Reuters. 

The couple reportedly got married on Richard Branson's Necker Island in 2007 and has two kids together. They reside in a Palo Alto compound that includes a $7 million home and an "eco-mansion" with a rooftop garden and solar panels. Page and Southworth also have a $45 million super-yacht called "Senses," which has a helipad and a Jacuzzi on its deck.

Clara Wu Tsai

Partner: Joseph Tsai, cofounder and executive vice chairman of Alibaba

Years married: 23 

Who she is: Clara Wu Tsai got her undergraduate degree at Stanford University and an MBA at Harvard Business School before working at both American Express and the Chinese shopping site Taobao. 

The Tsais bought a 49% stake in the Brooklyn Nets in 2017, and in August 2019, purchased the remaining share to become the sole owners. The couple also owns Barclays Center, the arena the team plays in, as well as the WNBA team, the New York Liberty. 

In October 2018, the Tsais made a significant contribution to Stanford's neurosciences institute, which has since been renamed the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute.

Wu Tsai is also an activist for criminal justice reform, and in early 2019, launched the Reform Alliance along with Meek Mill, Jay-Z, Robert Kraft, and 76ers co-owner Michael Rubin. The initiative's goal is to reform the probation and parole system. 

The couple got married in New York City in 1996 and lived in Hong Kong for 13 years before moving to La Jolla, California. They have three children: Alex, Dash, and Jacob.

Lynne Benioff

Partner: Marc Benioff, founder and co-CEO of Salesforce

Years married: 13

Who she is: Lynne Benioff is an active philanthropist, serving on the board of numerous causes, including the UCSF Benioff Children's Hospitals and the Benioff Ocean Initiative. Lynne and Marc Benioff have also signed the Giving Pledge, which states that they'll give away the majority of their wealth during their lifetime or in their will. 

The Benioffs own multiple houses, including a five-acre estate in Hawaii— Hawaii is also reportedly where the couple got married in a top-secret ceremony in 2006. 

Anu Nadella

Partner: Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft

Years married: 27 years

Who she is: Anu and Satya Nadella had a complicated — but romantic — immigration story: The couple got married in December 1992, when Anu still lived in India. While Satya had a green card, immigration authorities rejected Anu's visa application due to a long wait list. Satya gave up his green card and got an H-1B visa instead in order to make the immigration process work for Anu.

The couple now has three kids, including a son with special needs. Both Satya and Anu have been open about the challenges of raising their son, Zain, who has cerebral palsy — as a result, Anu is closely involved with Seattle Children's Hospital, including co-chairing the "It Starts With Yes" campaign, an effort to raise $1 billion to improve children's health. 

Nicole Systrom

Partner: Kevin Systrom, cofounder and former CEO of Instagram

Years married: Four

Who she is: Nicole Systrom is the founder of Sutro Energy Group, which is aimed at funding the clean-energy sector. Systrom has spent her career focused on energy and the environment — she went to Stanford University for both her undergrad and graduate degrees, both of which had an environmental focus. 

Nicole and Kevin Systrom met at Stanford, years before Kevin would go on to create Instagram — in fact, Kevin credits Nicole with coming up with the idea for Instagram filters. The couple got engaged over Thanksgiving in 2013, and married on Halloween in 2016, according to Vogue. The couple has a daughter together, Freya. 

Anjali Pichai

Partner: Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet

Years married:Over 25

Who she is: Anjali Pichai is a chemical engineer who met Sundar Pichai while in college at the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur. The couple has two children, Kiran and Kavya, and shares a contemporary home they built themselves, complete with an infinity pool, wine cellar, and underground nanny quarters, in Los Altos, California.

According to her LinkedIn page, Anjali worked at Accenture as a business analyst until 2002, then began working at Intuit as a business operations manager, although it's not clear if she still works there. 

Griffith R. Harsh IV

Partner: Meg Whitman, former CEO of HP, current CEO of Quibi

Years married: 39

Who he is: Griffith R. Harsh IV is an accomplished neurosurgeon who focuses on treating tumors in the brain, pituitary gland, and base of the skull. He's currently the chair of neurological surgery at UC Davis Health. Harsh attended both undergrad and medical school at Harvard University, studied at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, and got an MBA from Boston University. 

Harsh and Whitman met when Whitman was a sophomore at Princeton University. She invited him to her sister's wedding, but he forgot to attend and accidentally blew her off. The couple eventually made up, and got married in 1980. They have two sons together, Griffith V and William. 

Serena Williams

Partner: Alexis Ohanian, cofounder of Reddit

Years married: Two

Who she is: Serena Williams is one of the greatest tennis players, and one of the greatest athletes, of all time. She's won 23 grand slam singles titles, four Olympic gold medals, and has won $92.5 million in prize money over the course of her career. 

Williams and Ohanian met in May 2015 at the Rome Cavalieri hotel, when Ohanian sat down at the table next to Williams' outside by the pool, according to Vanity Fair. When they first met, Ohanian had never watched tennis and Williams knew nothing about Reddit, the platform Ohanian cofounded in 2005. The couple had their first official date in June of the year, and by December 2016, Ohanian proposed at the hotel where they met.

In early January 2017, Williams found out she was pregnant— she gave birth to their daughter, Alexis Olympia Ohanian Jr., in September of that year. The couple got married two months later in front of a star-studded guest list that included Beyoncé and Kim Kardashian. 

MacKenzie Bezos

Partner: Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon

Years married: 26, until their divorce in 2019

Who she is: MacKenzie Bezos is a writer and philanthropist. She is the author of two novels, the first of which won an American Book Award.  

Bezos studied fiction at Princeton University and worked as a research associate for investment management firm D.E. Shaw, where she met Jeff Bezos. They were married within six months, in 1993. MacKenzie Bezos was one of Amazon's earliest employees, working as an accountant for the company.

In early 2019, MacKenzie and Jeff Bezos announced they were divorcing. In April, she announced she was granting Jeff Bezos 75% of their jointly owned Amazon stock, which left her with an estimated $35.6 billion stake, making her one of the richest women on the planet. She has since signed the Giving Pledge. 

Nicole Shanahan

Partner: Sergey Brin, cofounder of Google

Years married: About a year

Who she is: Nicole Shanahan is the founder of a legal tech company called ClearAccessIP, which builds an analytics tool for patent lawyers and inventors. She has also been active in women's health and fertility, helping to fund a research center focused on reproductive health through her foundation, the Bia-Echo Foundation. 

Shanahan and Brin were first linked in 2015 after they were spotted together at the Jamaica wedding of a dating app CEO. In October 2019, it was revealed that the couple had been married since 2018. They have one child together, a baby girl, who was born in late 2018, according to Page Six. Brin has two other children from his previous marriage to 23andMe CEO Anne Wojcicki, whose older sister is Susan Wojcicki, CEO of YouTube.

• Tech executives like Larry Ellison, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk have found unusual ways to spend their billions. 
• Elon Musk bought the submarine car from "The Spy Who Loved Me," while Jeff Bezos dredged pieces of the Apollo 12 engine from the bottom of the Atlantic. 
• Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison owns 98% of the Hawaiian island of Lanai. 
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

If you're among the richest people in the world, chances are you've found some unusual ways to spend your money. 

That's what tech executives like Larry Ellison, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk have done, anyway — they've spent money on everything from a massive chunk of the state of Hawaii to the submarine car from the James Bond film "The Spy Who Loved Me." 

Some tech billionaires are famously frugal, while others spend money on more conventional expenditures like mansions or fabulous vacations. And while the tech billionaires featured below own their fair share of homes and yachts — plus found time for more noble pursuits like donating to charity or signing the Giving Pledge— they've also used their billions to pursue passion projects.

Here are some of the more unusual and extravagant ways tech executives have spent their money. 

SEE ALSO: How billionaire Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk went from getting bullied as a child to becoming one of the most successful and provocative men in tech

Many CEOs make expensive home and land purchases, but perhaps none more so than Oracle founder Larry Ellison. In 2012, the billionaire purchased 98% of the Hawaiian island Lanai.

Ellison reportedly paid $300 million for the island in 2012. It contains 90,000 acres of land and several resorts, and is home to more than 3,200 residents. Ellison plans to use to land to test environmentally friendly practices like solar power and electric vehicles. 

Source: Forbes

Unsurprisingly, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has an interest in unusual vehicles. In 2013, for example, he bought the Lotus Esprit submarine car that's used in the James Bond movie "The Spy Who Loved Me." Musk paid $920,000 at auction.

"It was amazing as a little kid in South Africa to watch James Bond in 'The Spy Who Loved Me' drive his Lotus Esprit off a pier, press a button and have it transform into a submarine underwater," Musk said in a statement to Jalopnik at the time. "I was disappointed to learn that it can't actually transform. What I'm going to do is upgrade it with a Tesla electric powertrain and try to make it transform for real."

Source: Jalopnik

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has invested $42 million in a mechanical clock that's buried inside a mountain in Texas.

The 10,000-year-clock, as it's called, was created by a group called The Long Now Foundation. It's a 500-foot-tall clock that's powered by thermal cycles and is designed to keep time for millennia.

Source: Business Insider

Bezos has a passion for space, as evidenced by his Blue Origin rocket company. In 2013, the exec also funded an expedition to retrieve the remains of multiple Apollo engines from the bottom of the ocean.

Bezos led a team that sent unmanned robots 14,000 feet down to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean off of Cape Canaveral, Florida, to gather the engine parts from the Apollo 12 moon mission. 

"To bring those pieces up on deck and actually touch them, that brought back for me all those feelings I had when I was 5 years old and watched those missions go to the moon," Bezos said in a video about the expedition, according to the Seattle Times. "If this results in one young explorer, one young adventurer, one young inventor, doing something amazing that helps the world, I'm totally fulfilled."

Source: Seattle Times

Google cofounder Sergey Brin has reportedly invested between $100 and $150 million of his own money in building a 600-foot flying airship.

Brin is said to be building the airship, which would be the world's largest aircraft, out of a NASA research center near Mountain View, California.

He reportedly envisions using it to make deliveries for humanitarian missions or as an "air yacht" for friends and family. 

Source: The Guardian

Brin's fellow Google cofounder Larry Page is also interested in flying vehicles, though of a slightly different variety: Page funds three different flying car startups.

Page has invested in a two-seater flying taxi called Cora and a flying boat called Flyer, which are both made by electric flight transportation company Kitty Hawk. He's also involved in Opener, a startup that makes a flying vehicle called BlackFly. 

It's not clear how much money Page has invested in these projects. 

Source: The Verge

And while many high-powered executives have private planes, Page and Brin one-upped the typical Gulfstream jet. In 2005, they bought a former passenger plane, a Boeing 767-200.

But in true Google fashion, Page and Brin tricked out the inside, adding a dining area, two staterooms with adjacent bathrooms, and multiple seating areas. The jet can hold up to 50 passengers and includes several first-class seats.

Meanwhile, Oracle's Larry Ellison owns a decommissioned Soviet jet fighter, the Mikoyan MiG-29.

Source: The Wall Street Journal

• Silicon Valley might be competitive, but it also appears to be a breeding ground for friendships among its famous execs.
• It makes sense: the tech world is home to some of the richest people in the world, and life can probably get a little lonely at the top. 
• Elon Musk, for example, is close friends with Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, as well as Twitter and Square CEO Jack Dorsey. 
• Larry Ellison gave a eulogy at Steve Jobs' funeral, and he also has a love/hate relationship with cloud rival Marc Benioff. 
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. Elon Musk and Larry Ellison. Jeff Bezos and Barry Diller. 

What do all these high-profile pairings have in common? They're all close friendships within the world of tech. 

Silicon Valley may be known for its competitive spirit, but it's also fostered several years-long friendships among some of its most famous executives. Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates and investor Warren Buffett, for example, have been buddies for nearly 30 years. And Larry Ellison and Marc Benioff have been friends for decades, even though their respective enterprise software companies are technically rivals.

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has several close pals in tech, including friends he's defended online or taken for Tesla test drives. 

Here's a closer look at some of the friendships among tech CEOs. 

SEE ALSO: From Facebook to Tesla, here are the lesser-known cofounders of some of the biggest tech companies in the world

Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey

While it's not clear if Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and Twitter and Square CEO Jack Dorsey actually hang out in real life, they do seem to have a solid virtual friendship. 

As far back as 2016, Dorsey said Musk was "a really good model" for how to use Twitter. More recently, Dorsey said in an interview that Musk is his favorite Twitter follow, to which Musk responded, "Thanks Jack, Twitter rocks!"

Then, in January, Dorsey and Musk spoke over video chat in front of Twitter employees and Musk gave Dorsey advice on how to improve the platform. 

In March, as Dorsey faces a possible ouster at the hands of an activist hedge fund, Musk publicly tweeted his support of the CEO. 

"Just want to say that I support @jack as Twitter CEO," Musk tweeted. "He has a good <3." 

Jeff Bezos and Barry Diller

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and IAC Chairman Barry Diller appear to have been friends for years. 

In January 2016, Diller correctly predicted that Bezos would become the richest person in the world.

And in the last few years, as Bezos has gone through changes in his personal life, he's been spotted hanging out with Diller and his wife, designer Diane von Furstenberg, more often. Diller and von Furstenberg have reportedly attended multipleparties hosted by Bezos, and Bezos and his girlfriend, Lauren Sanchez, have sailed aboard von Furstenberg's yacht. The two couples were also reportedly spotted exploring Venice together.

Larry Ellison and Steve Jobs

Oracle founder Larry Ellison and late Apple CEO Steve Jobs were friends for 25 years before Jobs' death in 2011. 

Ellison and Jobs used to be neighbors in Woodside, California, and the pair often went hiking together. It was during one of those hikes that Ellison helped Jobs plot how to regain control of Apple after he was ousted — Ellison even suggested buying Apple himself and installing Jobs as CEO.

It was Jobs who came up with the idea that Apple should acquire his company, Next, instead. When Ellison questioned how the pair would make money, Jobs said to him, "Larry, this is why it's so important that I'm your friend. You don't need any more money," Ellison said in a commencement speech in 2016. 

Ellison said he spent time with Jobs in his final days, taking shorter walks around the block with him as he became weaker. Ellison gave a eulogy at Jobs' funeral. 

Elon Musk, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin

Elon Musk has been friends with the cofounders of Google for a long time.

In the early days of Musk's tenure at the electric car maker, he took Brin and Page on a test drive. Unfortunately, a software bug prevented the car from going any faster than 10 miles per hour, Musk recounted at a company shareholder meeting in 2016. Despite "the world's worst demo," however, the duo ended up investing in Tesla anyway, Musk said. 

Over the years, Musk and Page especially have become close friends — Musk even sometimes sleeps at Page's house when he's in town, and Page once said he'd rather leave his money to Musk than give it away to charity.

Brin, Page, and Musk also reportedly used to hang out in a Google-owned apartment and brainstorm ideas. 

"It's fun for the three of us [including Google cofounder Sergey Brin] to talk about kind of crazy things, and we find stuff that eventually turns out to be real," Page told Ashlee Vance, who wrote a 2015 biography about Musk.

Larry Ellison and Marc Benioff

Ellison and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff met when Benioff began working at Oracle when he was 23. He was a star early on, earning a "rookie of the year" award that same year and becoming Oracle's youngest VP by age 26. He spent 13 years at Oracle, during which he became a trusted lieutenant to Ellison. 

The pair became such close friends that rumors swirled about their relationship's backstory — people wondered if they were related, or if Ellison had been Benioff's childhood babysitter. Ellison and Benioff took trips together, sailed on Ellison's yacht, and went on double dates. 

Benioff began working on Salesforce with Ellison's blessing, and Ellison became an investor, putting in $2 million early on. 

The duo has publiclyfeuded over the years — including when Benioff fired Ellison from Salesforce's board — but Benioff has also described Ellison as his mentor. 

"There is no one I've learned more from than Larry Ellison," Benioff said in 2013.

Bill Gates and Warren Buffett

Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett and Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates met in 1991 when Buffett was invited over to Gates' mother's house. Neither man was very interested in meeting the other, but they ended up hitting it off. Soon after, Gates asked Buffett for a business book recommendation, and Buffett loaned him his copy of "Business Adventures" by John Brookes — Gates still has it today. 

Since then, the duo has done everything from play table tennis together to participate in Berkshire Hathaway's annual newspaper toss competition. And Gates, his wife Melinda, and Buffett launched the Giving Pledge together in 2010, vowing to give away the majority of their wealth in their lifetimes or in their wills. 

While Buffett owns a major stake in Apple, he's said that he'll never invest in Microsoft due to his friendship with Gates. 

Larry Ellison and Elon Musk

Ellison and Musk appear to be two of the friendliest CEOs in tech, if their relationships with Benioff and Jobs, and Page, Brin, and Dorsey are any indication. So it's not much of a surprise that the two moguls are "very close" friends with each other, too. 

Back in 2018, when Ellison was named to Tesla's board of directions, he highlighted his relationship with Musk. 

"I think Tesla has a lot of upside," Ellison said at the time. "I am not sure how many people know, but I'm very close friends with Elon Musk, and I'm a big investor in Tesla."

It makes sense that Ellison and Musk would get along well, as they're two of the most colorful personalities in tech. Ellison owns an entire $300 million island in Hawaii, likes to race yachts, and doesn't mind trash-talking his competitors. Musk spends his money on rare cars, has had multiple high-profile relationships, and is often outspoken on Twitter. 

• Glossier founder Emily Weiss and Stripe executive Will Gaybrick are officially engaged, according to a recent Instagram post from the couple.
• There are several other leaders in the tech industry who are dating, and married to, prominent venture capitalists, models, athletes, and powerful people.
• These are 15 of the most powerful couples in the tech world.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

As the singer Grimes, Tesla CEO Elon Musk's girlfriend, might say, we appreciate power.

While some tech leaders, like Mark Zuckerberg, have been with their partners since college, notable figures in the tech sector have gravitated toward partners with just as much — or more! — power and pull in their industries.

The CEO and founder of Glossier, Emily Weiss, recently got engaged to her boyfriend Will Gaybrick, the chief financial officer at e-payment company Stripe. Weiss announced the couple's engagement in a post on Instagram, where they first made their relationship public in January 2019.

But there have also been some high-profile splits in the past year that have hit some prominent tech leaders. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and MacKenzie Bezos announced in early January that they were getting a divorce.

Here are 15 of the top power couples in the tech industry:

SEE ALSO: The US's top doctor is calling on Kylie Jenner and other influencers to help young people understand the seriousness of the coronavirus pandemic

Emily Weiss and Will Gaybrick

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Who they are: Weiss is the cofounder and CEO of online makeup company Glossier. Gaybrick is the chief financial officer at payment platform Stripe. Both startups are worth more than $1 billion.

Their backstory: Not a whole lot about their relationship has been shared publicly. However, the couple has made public announcements about their relationship on Instagram: The couple made their relationship public in an Instagram post from New Years Day of 2019, then announced their engagement in a post in March 2020. 

"Even during the wildest most uncertain times, there are silver linings," Weiss wrote in the caption for the Instagram photo. Thier engagement came just as the World Health Organization classified coronavirus, the COVID-19 disease, as a "pandemic."

Evan Spiegel and Miranda Kerr

Who they are: Spiegel is the cofounder and CEO of Snap Inc., Snapchat's parent company. Kerr is one of the highest-earning models in the world, and founder of wellness company KORA Organics.

Their backstory: The couple started dating in 2015, and got married in May 2017. They have one son who was born in May 2018, and Kerr announced in October 2019 she had given birth to their second child: a baby bay named Myles.

Read more: Inside the whirlwind romance of Snap CEO Evan Spiegel and model Miranda Kerr, who are raising 3 kids together while each running their own companies

Sergey Brin and Nicole Shanahan

Who they are: Brin is the cofounder of Google, and currently serves as the president of its parent company, Alphabet. Shanahan is the founder of legal tech company ClearAccessIP and the Bia-Echo Foundation.

Their backstory: The couple has been linked together since 2015, when they were seen together at the star-studded wedding for a dating app CEO in Jamaica. The couple reportedly have a baby girl together who was born in late 2018, although they've kept information about their child under wraps.

It was revealed in October 2019 that the couple has been married since 2018, but there were no other details made public about the wedding.

Read more: Google's Sergey Brin has secretly been married to the founder of a legal tech startup since 2018

Karlie Kloss and Joshua Kushner

Who they are: Kushner is the founder of VC firm Thrive Capital and cofounder of health insurance startup Oscar Health. Kloss is a prominent model who runs coding camps for young girls called Kode with Klossy.

Their backstory: Kloss and Kushner reportedly started dating in 2012. The couple got married in October 2018 in a small ceremony, then got married again in June 2019 on a ranch in Wyoming.

Read more:Everything we know about venture capitalist Josh Kushner and model Karlie Kloss, the power couple with unconventional ties to the White House

Jen Rubio and Stewart Butterfield

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Who they are: Rubio is the cofounder and president of luggage startup Away, and Butterfield in the cofounder and CEO of work messaging platform Slack.

Their backstory: The relationship between Rubio and Butterfield has flew under the radar, but it came under the spotlight in May 2019 when Butterfield jokingly proposed to Rubio on Twitter. Butterfield's Twitter proposal followed news that Away had landed a $1.4 billion valuation, and the Slack CEO joked he wasn't "just a goldigger."

Butterfield and Rubio both acknowledged the proposal was a joke after a few hours. However, it seems Butterfield had apparently been waiting for that Memorial Day weekend to propose — for real, this time. There's no word yet on a wedding date.

Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan

Who they are: Zuckerberg is the CEO and cofounder of Facebook. Together, the couple launched the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a philanthropy focused on science and education.

Their backstory: The two are college sweethearts, and met in 2003 while they were students at Harvard University. The couple were married in a surprise ceremony in May 2012, the day after Facebook went public. The couple has two daughters, who were born in 2015 and 2017.

Read more:The 17-year relationship of college sweethearts Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan

Serena Williams and Alexis Ohanian

Who they are: Ohanian cofounded Reddit, then later cofounded the VC firm Initialized Capital. Williams is one of the best tennis players in the world, and ranks third on the all-time list of most winning players with 39 major tournament titles.

Their backstory: The couplemet in May 2015 in Rome, and started dating that same year. They got engaged at the end of 2016 at the same place in Rome where they had first met. Williams gave birth to the couple's daughter in 2017, and they got married later that year.

Read more:Tennis superstar Serena Williams and Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian have had a whirlwind few years. Here's how the power couple met, and everything that's happened since.

Bill Gates and Melinda Gates

Who they are: Bill Gates is the cofounder and former CEO of Microsoft, and the second-richest person in the world. Melinda Gates cofounded the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation with her husband in 2000. 

Their backstory: Bill Gates first asked out Melinda Gates at a Microsoft company picnic after she was hired as a product manager in 1987. They dated for seven years before they got married. The couple's philanthropic organization, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, has invested billions of dollars in efforts to enhance healthcare globally and reduce poverty. The Gates's have two daughters and a son together.

Read more:Inside the 25-year marriage of Bill and Melinda Gates, who met at work, have 3 kids, live in a $124 million home, spend $45 billion on philanthropy, and still wash dishes together every night

Marissa Mayer and Zachary Bogue

Who they are: Mayer is the former CEO of Yahoo, and the cofounder of tech incubator Lumi Labs. Before that, she was Google's 20th employee. Bogue is a cofounder and managing partner at the investment firm Data Collective VC.

Their backstory: The couple met through a mutual friend in 2007, and got married two years later. Mayer announced her first pregnancy in 2012 on the same day she was publicly named Yahoo's CEO. She gave birth to identical twin girls in 2015.

Read more: The rise and fall of Marissa Mayer, the once-beloved CEO of Yahoo now pursuing her own venture

Marc Benioff and Lynne Benioff

Who they are: Marc Benioff is the founder and CEO of enterprise cloud company Salesforce, known for his philanthropic efforts to combat Bay Area homelessness. Lynne Benioff is a notable philanthropist on the board of the nonprofit ONE.

Their backstory: The Benioffs were married in 2006, although details of their Hawaiian wedding were kept secretive. In 2018, the couple bought Time Magazine together for $190 million.

Read more:The rise of Marc Benioff, the bombastic owner of Time Magazine who just became Salesforce's sole CEO, has an $8 billion fortune, and owns a 5-acre compound in Hawaii

Dave Morin and Brit Morin

Who they are: David Morin helped to create Facebook Platform and Facebook Connect, and cofounded Path, a now-defunct photo-based platform. Brit Morin is the founder of Brit + Co., a popular lifestyle media company for millennial women.

Their backstory: The pair first met when they both were working at Apple years ago. They got engaged in 2011 after an elaborate proposal set in the Maldives, and got married the following year.

Read more: What's Tough And Awesome About Being A Well-Known Couple In Silicon Valley

Kevin Hartz and Julia Hartz

Who they are: Kevin Hartz and Julia Hartz cofounded the ticketing startup Eventbrite in 2006. He is currently a chairman at the company, while she serves as CEO.

Their backstory: The couple met back in 2003 at a mutual friend's wedding. In a 2012 interview with Business Insider, Julia Hartz said that "we knew we wanted to start a company together before we lived together." The pair got married in 2006, and now have two children.

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Barry Diller and Diane von Furstenberg

Who they are: Diller founded the Internet company IAC in 1995, and now serves as a chairman for that company and for Expedia. Furstenberg is a notable designer with an eponymous fashion company who first rose to fame after marrying into a royal German family.

Their backstory: The couple got married in 2001, but have had an on-and-off relationship and friendship that's spanned more than 40 years. They first met years earlier in the 70s at a party Diller was hosting.

Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston

Who they are: Graham and Livingston helped found Y Combinator, a wildly successful startup accelerator program that's produced companies like Dropbox, Airbnb, and Stripe.

Their backstory: The pair started Y Combinator in 2005 while they were already dating. They got married in 2008, and now have two sons.

Read more:Paul Graham Founded Y Combinator 7 Years Ago To Create A Job For His Wife

Diane Greene and Mendel Rosenblum

Who they are: Greene and Rosenblum both helped found the cloud computing software company VMware in 1998. They also together cofounded the cloud startup Bebop, which Google acquired in 2015. Greene was put in charge of Google's cloud computing unit, and now sits on Alphabet's board of directors.

Their backstory: The couple met while attending the University of California, Berkeley, when Rosenblum gave Greene a ride on his motorcycle. They have two children together.

• Google's company culture, which became something of a Silicon Valley paradigm, has steadily become much more corporate, according to several current and former employees who say they long for the Google of days gone by.
• "Things that worked for Google when it was a smaller company have stopped working." Employees describe blow-out TGIF sessions where leadership would talk about secret projects and encourage open discussion.
• But Google's TGIF sessions are now much less regular and focus on essential business. "Sundar is much more careful with his words than Larry, Sergey or Eric were," said one insider.
• Do you work at Google? Contact this reporter using encrypted messaging app Signal (+1 628-228-1836) or email (hslangley@protonmail.com).
• Click here to get BI Prime's weekly 'Trending' tech newsletter in your email inbox.

Google's weekly TGIF meetings were once a safe haven where employees would come together to hash out ideas, boast about their week's achievements, and air concerns about the company without fear of retaliation.

But those weekly town halls were also emblematic of a company that no longer exists, according to several current and former employees speaking to Business Insider who bemoan what has become a more "corporate" and closed company.

In November last year, Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced that the weekly TGIF meetings would be pushed back to once a month. "TGIF has traditionally provided a place to come together, share progress, and ask questions, but it's not working in its current form," he wrote in an email to employees.

The decision followed many months of growing tensions inside the company, with employees voicing grievances with leadership over issues ranging from the company's controversial military AI contract to its handling of sexual misconduct allegations.

Google's transparent workplace and endless supply of free meals were once held up as the gold standard of Silicon Valley's enviable corporate culture. Now, employees say that transparency has vanished along with TGIF, and many long for a time where Google operated much differently.

"There was this sense we were all on the same team," said one veteran employee. "I'm not saying we don't feel that way now, but it's really hard to do with more than 100,000 people."

There are 123,048 employees on the Alphabet payroll as per the company's most recent numbers. 10 years ago, it had just over 24,000.

"We know that things that worked for Google when it was a smaller company have stopped working," said another employee who has been at the company for many years, including several working under cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page. "Even when the company had like 30,000 or 40,000 people it was super impressive how much trust it had in every single employee. As that grew there were instances where the trust was unwarranted"

Since going monthly, Google's TGIF meetings have also become much more formal and focused on essential business. In its most recent TGIF, held on May 7, Google CFO Ruth Porat made a rare appearance to discuss the company's Q1 earnings, but insiders say most of the focus was on updates to Google Shopping. Many employees don't tune into the sessions anymore, or choose to watch a recording at a later date.

"I think they used to work a long time ago, but I think the culture of openness and people feeling empowered to talk on what they want to, I think that hasn't been able to work as well as a large company," said one employee.

Insiders now describe a more "corporate" culture that has taken over the company that was once held up as a paradigm of creativity and transparency in Silicon Valley.

"We'd have a fairly open and transparent conversation. People would write memes, blow off a little steam, and then everyone would find a way to come together," said another insider.

"Larry and Sergey could share very confidential things. But now, people are concerned that if something is visible very widely across the company it's going to get out."

'We were waking up each morning expecting someone to have written about it'

When Sundar Pichai announced the end of weekly TGIFs, he als0 mentioned a "coordinated effort" to leak the contents of the meetings, which was happening more frequently. The most significant leak came in 2018 where an employee sent the conservative news site Breitbart a video of an all-hands meeting held shortly after the 2016 election.

Breitbart used the leaked footage of the meeting, which featured Brin, Page, Porat, and Pichai, to try to demonstrate political bias among Google's top brass. Plans for Google to supply the military with AI technology (Project Maven) and re-enter the Chinese search market (Project Dragonfly), both of which were abandoned, were also leaked, and in 2018 the cracks in Google's culture were showing.

The situation reflects the deeply politicized society that now Google operates in, and the increasingly central role its technology occupies in some of the most divisive issues.

Even as details about the internal military and China search projects were leaking, Google employees continued to keep less politically-charged but equally sensational projects under wraps. 

In the months before Google revealed its showstopping Duplex AI project at I/O in May 2018 for example, insiders say that employees throughout the company were using the program's voice-based restaurant reservation abilities. The Googlers were "dogfooding" the Duplex technology – a common practice where employees test a feature before it's made public.

"We were waking up each morning expecting someone to have written about it, and they hadn't," said one employee who was testing the software. "It was exposed to every employee, and yet it didn't get out."

Google has slowly drifted away from its previous cultural touchstones, such as its "Don't Be Evil" motto and the once ubiquitous 20% time for employee pet projects, which insiders say still exists but in a different form where employees will usually help out on other existing projects rather than starting something from scratch.

But sources say 2018 was the tipping point when Google's culture changed irrevocably. 

Google grappled with several major controversies and a company-wide employee walkout that year. In 2019 Sergey and Larry stopped attending TGIF sessions altogether, which employees say was an obvious sign that 2018 had shifted the company's culture.

"Sundar is much more careful with his words"

Under Pichai, there's less room for the candid and freewheeling internal culture of old, a change that some insiders acknowledge was not unreasonable for a company of Google's size.

"Sundar is much more careful with his words than Larry, Sergey or Eric were," said another Google employee. "I saw my fair share of events where Larry, Sergey or Eric would say say something that would give Kent [Walker, Google's chief legal officer] heartburn."

The TGIF meetings are just one of the ways Google communicates with employees. Right now, a lot of the internal messaging comes through emails or posts on Google's internal network, Moma.

One tool inside Moma is Memegen, a meme generator where employees anonymously create funny pictures often skewering the company and leadership. When everything else inside the company can feel in flux, Memegen is the one constant that employees still turn to in order to blow off steam.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin are now essentially checked out of Google, although they are still directors on the Alphabet board. As for Google's TGIF sessions, employees now post questions ahead of time and others can vote on the ones they want to prioritize. 

But employees say the breakdown in regular face-to-face meetings has created a distance between leadership and employees that some are unhappy about. "I think the TGIF change was bad for the company," said one insider. "It really silences calls for accountability at the top. Leaders need to take the hard questions."

Weekly meetings are still held for certain regions and parts of the organization, but employees who have been at the company for many years say they miss the weekly rough-and-tumble sessions that gave Google its identity.

"Sergey and Larry were the beating heart of TGIF for a long time," said one long-time employee. "In hindsight, it's obvious to see that once they stopped attending, TGIF would slowly wither away."

Do you work at Google? Contact this reporter using encrypted messaging app Signal (+1 628-228-1836) or email (hslangley@protonmail.com).

SEE ALSO: The pandemic has given Silicon Valley a chance to repair its reputation, but that means little to antitrust regulators set on holding big tech accountable

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Here's what it's like to travel during the coronavirus outbreak

• YouTube's sale to Google for $1.65 billion in October 2006 altered the course of Silicon Valley history. 
• In honor of YouTube's 15th anniversary, Business Insider spoke with early employees, investors, and founders about the whirlwind 18 months of YouTube's life as an independent company. That story is impossible to tell completely without delving into the weeks and months leading up to YouTube's landmark sale. 
• From the day YouTube decided to sell to the day the deal was announced was a matter of weeks. In the end, YouTube was hours away from inking a deal with Yahoo before deciding to give Google one last shot at acquiring the company. 
• The sale came at the perfect time for the fledgling startup: YouTube was burning through cash, running out of server space, and weathering litigation threats from record labels. Its staff was working around the clock and its founders were growing increasingly wary of how to sustain the company without some muscle in its corner.
• This is the inside story of YouTube's sale, including the quiet bidding war, the last-minute deals with some of the largest rights holders in the world, and a late-night meeting in a Denny's parking lot. 
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

In the early hours of an October day in 2006, David Drummond, Google's general counsel, and Gideon Yu, YouTube's chief financial officer, huddled over the hood of Yu's car, which was parked in a Denny's parking lot in Redwood City, California. 

As they used the light from their Blackberry phones to read through a sheaf of documents, a police officer pulled up. He briefly blared his siren, casting a bright light on the pair of executives. He demanded to know why they were having a clandestine meeting in a Denny's parking lot at 3 a.m.

"We're signing a merger agreement, sir," Yu said with his hands in the air. 

The officer called Yu over to his car. Yu, dressed casually in shorts, a t-shirt, and a backwards baseball cap, walked over and showed the officer the documents, which stated that Google would buy YouTube for $1.65 billion. The officer told them to carry on. 

Drummond and Yu, still shaking from the experience, signed the papers and went home, their respective companies celebrating for different reasons. Google, for acquiring what would become one of the most valuable parts of its growing empire. YouTube, for gaining some muscle in its corner. The company, only 18 months old at that point, was fending off potentially costly copyright claims and scrambling to support a user base that was growing so quickly, the site's infrastructure was cracking. 

Though it had already become a global sensation, on the inside, YouTube was stretched nearly to a breaking point. 

'We didn't have the resources to keep on fighting'

The months leading up to that day had been hectic for YouTube. 

The small team — led by cofounders Steve Chen, YouTube's chief technology officer, and Chad Hurley, the company's CEO — was struggling to keep up with demand. It was a time before technology like Amazon Web Services existed, and YouTube was burning through server space.

"It was pretty balls to the wall, I guess you would say. I think we were working seven days a week," Yu Pan, an engineer and YouTube's first employee, told Business Insider. "We were growing like crazy. The number of views was exponential. We were burning hard drives like nobody's business." 

Gideon Yu, who joined as CFO in September 2006, remembers the team begging everyone they knew for access to server space.

"There was a time when we reached out to all of our investors and all of our friends and said, 'Hey' — and this email actually went out — 'if you have any servers that you're not using, can we borrow them?'" Yu said. "We literally went around to friends at companies, at their houses, and got every server we could." 

On top of that, YouTube was scrambling to avoid being seen as another Napster-like company. So much content owned by music labels and movie studios was showing up on YouTube that the employees couldn't take it down fast enough. 

"The founders did not intend it to be a place for pirated content," according to Roelof Botha, who had worked with the YouTube founders years earlier at PayPal and pushed his firm, Sequoia Capital, to invest in YouTube. "From the get-go, we worked with the legal team and started to build a content moderation team. As soon as you let things like that happen, that drags down the site. If you let that stuff filter through, it will just take over like a cancer."

At the time, the litigation threats were a very big risk for YouTube, Botha said. 

"It made Chad and Steve question whether it was worth soldiering on with the company," he said. "We didn't have the resources to keep on fighting."

Zahavah Levine, YouTube's general counsel and VP of business affairs, remembers feeling like YouTube couldn't keep up. The infrastructure demands were too high. The company's bank account was dwindling. Music company executives were demanding hundreds of millions of dollars. Other players were practically banging down YouTube's door trying to form partnerships. 

"We were doing the best we could," Yu, the CFO, said. "But when you took the confluence of all these factors, it became very difficult to raise money. And look, raising more money, it would mean more money would go right out the door to infrastructure as well as to potential deals with IP owners. So we were stuck in a little bit of a catch-22 there."

One afternoon, the company had a contentious meeting with Universal Music, which was being "very, very aggressive" with YouTube in marking copyright violations of its music, according to Botha. Later that day, Chen and Hurley made their way to the bar next door to the YouTube office, 3rd Avenue Sports Bar, where they would sometimes go at night to have discussions about the company. They had taken a walk around the block in San Mateo and made a decision. At the bar, they told Yu they wanted to sell.

The way Yu tells it, both Chen and Hurley were frustrated by the amount of meetings the company was having about copyright infringement, meetings that were becoming increasingly hostile. They told Yu that they had started YouTube to make a good product. This wasn't what they signed up for. 

The group discussed whether it made sense to look to larger companies for an acquisition, companies who had the resources to negotiate deals and solve infrastructure issues — a company with the "really blunt instrument" of a lot of people and a lot of money, Yu said. 

After consulting with YouTube's board and its investors, everyone agreed: it was time to move forward with an acquisition.

The bidding war

YouTube's acquisition took only about three weeks after that night at the sports bar, Yu said.

While the bidding war for YouTube was said to involve nearly a half-dozen players, including Microsoft, Viacom, and News Corp., at the end of the day, there were really only two contenders: Yahoo and Google. 

"The bidding war was actually a very small and tight bidding war," Yu said. "We wanted to keep information flow very tight, minimize the chances of leaks. The minute we got rights holders and other folks involved in that kind of a circus, it could have ended a lot more poorly for YouTube than it ended up ending."

Neither Chen nor Hurley came from finance backgrounds, and turned to their investors at Sequoia for advice on how to negotiate the terms of the deal. 

"We used to have a pizza dinner at my place here, at our house in the dining room. We would all sit around our table, and Roelof Botha was in charge of getting the pizza," Pierre Lamond, a former partner at Sequoia, said. "It was clear to both Yahoo and Google that we had a unique product, that it would be very difficult to compete with. We had the tailwind by then."

Yu, who had been Yahoo's treasurer before joining YouTube, said he called his old colleagues and told them they had a chance to buy YouTube. But if Yahoo was interested, it needed to set up a meeting right away. 

What followed sounds like Silicon Valley lore, but it's been well-documented: Because the YouTube founders had become so famous in Silicon Valley, they had to pick a meeting place no one would notice. They chose a Denny's in Redwood City, a 14-minute drive from YouTube's offices.

On the first day, Hurley and Chen met Google's Larry Page and Eric Schmidt there. The next, executives from Yahoo. (Chen told journalist Sarah Lacy at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2011 that he ordered the mozzarella sticks.) 

Soon, Google made an offer. It was, according to Yu, too low. 

Meanwhile, YouTube had been working on deals of its own with the music labels in hopes of avoiding costly copyright lawsuits. In September 2006, Levine and Chris Maxcy — one of the earliest YouTube employees in charge of business development for the site — closed a deal with Warner Music. 

Levine described it as a "landmark, first-of-kind" deal, one that would enable YouTube to host user-generated videos that contained music owned by Warner for a share of the ad revenue. 

At the time, Levine and Maxcy were negotiating three more deals with big rights holders as quickly as possible. On the day YouTube announced its acquisition, it also announced three separate deals: one with CBS, which would allow YouTube to broadcast CBS programs; the other two were with music labels, Universal Music Group and the predecessor to Sony Music, allowing YouTube to air their music videos. 

"We were negotiating the acquisition prices between Yahoo and Google simultaneously with those rights deals, and we were saying to Yahoo and Google, 'Look, just assume that we're going to get those deals done and let's negotiate accordingly,'" Yu said. 

Levine said she essentially moved into the law firm they were working with at the time.

"I lived in San Francisco, but I couldn't even afford the time to go back and forth between Palo Alto and San Francisco," Levine said. "I took a hotel room right next to the law firm where I slept an hour or two a night."

As if there weren't already enough moving parts, YouTube had outgrown its San Mateo office and was planning a move to San Bruno. Sequoia's Lamond had used his connections with higher-ups at The Gap to get them to lease their old headquarters to YouTube.

The plans to move to the new office had been in place for months, well before YouTube had decided to sell, but the timing made things complicated for Levine, who was still negotiating the licensing deals along with Maxcy. 

"We were in the office at like, 2 o'clock in the morning on a Saturday night, hammering out these deals, and the movers were there packing everything up," Levine said. "I remember being on a call with Sony Music and suddenly the call was disconnected and the movers had pulled the plug of some piece of hardware that was related to our phone system and our printer. We were saying, 'No! Stop! It's OK! Do not disconnect these phones, do not disconnect our printer!'"

One last chance for Google

By early October, YouTube was close to signing a deal — but not with Google. YouTube had a meeting on the books with Yahoo for a full day of due diligence, and the plan was to sign a term sheet for an acquisition at the end of the day, according to Yu. 

The day before, they decided to give Google one last chance. 

"We put Yahoo on the 'back-burner' while we pushed Google for a higher price," Lamond said.

Yu said he got approval from Hurley and Chen to give Google a price.

"I said, 'If you hit this price, we will cancel our meeting with Yahoo,'" Yu said.

The YouTube team proposed $1.65 billion: a number purposefully 10% more than what eBay paid for PayPal in 2002, according to Botha. PayPal's alumni network, which included Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Reid Hoffman, in addition to the YouTube founders and Botha, had a "healthy competition," Botha said.

Google agreed to the price, and YouTube said it was ready to do the deal. But the plan was still to meet with Yahoo the next morning — if this deal was going to happen, it needed to happen right away so YouTube didn't cancel with Yahoo and leave itself high and dry. Drummond and Yu would need to work all night and into the morning to get it done. 

That's how they found themselves, in the middle of the night, back at Denny's — a 14-minute drive from YouTube and a 12-minute drive from the Googleplex — signing the papers on the hood of Yu's car. 

"I went back and I showed the papers to Chad, to Steve, and then we called Yahoo and canceled the meeting," Yu said. "And that's how it happened."

Yahoo declined to comment on its involvement in YouTube's sale. 

'It was all on adrenaline'

From the day the term sheet was signed to the day the deal was announced was a matter of days — Chen estimates it was five, Levine and Yu both pegged it at about a week. Either way, the turnaround was quick. 

"By that time, it was all on adrenaline," Chen said. "We had signed the deal, it was down at the legal offices. I remember then driving at something like 100, 110 miles per hour to San Bruno and walking into the office for the first time and making the announcement for the team."

There was no big, flashy announcement, no fanfare — Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt showed up at the new San Bruno office to announce the acquisition with Hurley and Chen.

Jamie Byrne, who joined YouTube in June 2006 as director of ad sales and is still at the company as senior director of creator partnerships, described it as "this completely surreal, shocking moment."

"I think what made it even more poignant for many of us was that the competition for YouTube at the time was Google Video," Byrne said. "There was a lot of excitement around the fact that we now had this incredible benefit of the infrastructure and the support that Google was going to be able to provide us, but also a sense of pride that we went up against the biggest possible player in the space and we actually were very successful in what we were doing."

While some YouTube employees were in-the-know about the acquisition, others, like Misty Ewing-Davis, a content moderator, weren't clued in. The employees expected that Monday would be consumed by the office move, not a life-changing acquisition. Many of the employees were dressed in what Ewing-Davis described as "grubby clothes," since the team was planning to spend the day figuring out the new seating plan and assembling desks. 

The team ended up walking across the parking lot to a since-demolished TGI Fridays and had a few drinks to celebrate.

"I'm sure if anybody has photos from that day, we all just look like slobs," Ewing-Davis said. "Nobody expected that." 

Byrne remembers the team writing and recording a short video that Hurley and Chen ended up filming outside in the parking lot that day, the red and white striped awning of TGI Fridays visible in the background. 

In the video, a clearly giddy Hurley and Chen, dressed in blazers, announced the sale and thanked the community of creators. 

"We're going to stay committed to developing the best service for you, developing the most innovative service and tools and technologies so you can keep having fun on our site," Hurley said.

A 'pretty big step up'

Life remained mostly unchanged for the YouTube crew after the acquisition was completed in November. YouTube was — and remains to this day — in a separate office in San Bruno. 

Chen left YouTube for Google in 2009, and moved on from the company two years later. Hurley stayed on as CEO until 2010, when Google's Salar Kamangar took over. Chen says he and Hurley had "already been talking about doing something else together," and they partnered up in 2011 to launch an internet company called AVOS Systems. 

Most of the early YouTube employees noticed only minor changes to their life, especially at first. Google added its mini convenience-stores to YouTube's office, where employees could access as many free packs of gum and soft drinks as they wanted. Yu Pan, YouTube's employee No. 1, noticed that the company parties got better. The day after the acquisition was announced, the staff got to have a catered lunch of Subway sandwiches, according to Gideon Yu. 

"We were snacking on Cup of Noodles and stuff at the old office," he said. "Pretty big step up." 

But Google had promised to let YouTube keep doing what it was doing, to stay hands-off and let it grow, and to keep fostering the community of creators YouTube had built. It kept that promise. 

"You always hear these nightmare stories of integrated companies, but that wasn't the case for us," said Kevin Donahue, YouTube's vice president of content at the time.

Even under the new ownership of a tech giant, Chen and Hurley had control. They shared an office, from which they delegated tasks to newfound hoards of employees that came from Google. As long as they could deliver the promised traffic demonstrating YouTube's monumental growth, they had say over the decision-making, Chen said.

The biggest concern to the team was presenting YouTube and Google Video as a united front going forward. 

"It was like shaking hands with our biggest enemy and now we were being forced to be allies," Chen said. "It sounds awkward at first, but it was just the Google Video and YouTube teams being merged together."

Eventually, as is the case with nearly every startup that is able to grow or become acquired, the dynamic shifted. YouTube started to feel less like a small, close-knit family and more like what it eventually became: a multi-billion-dollar business housed inside one of the biggest companies on the planet. 

Botha, the Sequoia partner who served on YouTube's board, remembers walking into YouTube's office days after the deal was announced. After a year of getting to know everyone on a first-name basis, he says he was stunned to see new faces staring back at him.

"I walk in, and they had replaced everybody. They had a new front desk person, " Botha said. "I felt like a complete outsider, I was so taken aback. It was clear at that point: It was Google's company."

Now read:

• 'We had no idea how to do it': YouTube's founders, investors, and first employees tell the chaotic inside story of how it rose from failed dating site to $1.65 billion video behemoth
• Take a look at the history-making pitch deck YouTube used to secure its first $11.5 million from Sequoia Capital in 2005, and the investor memo that convinced the firm of the platform's potential
• 7 early YouTubers reveal the moments they knew they made it big

SEE ALSO: 'We had no idea how to do it': YouTube's founders, investors, and first employees tell the chaotic inside story of how it rose from failed dating site to $1.65 billion video behemoth

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• The Daily Beast has identified Sergey Brin as the sole donor to a secretive disaster-response charity called GSD.
• GSD sends its staff, many of whom are ex-military, to disaster areas around the world.
• It now says it is helping with COVID-19 testing in California.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Sergey Brin, Google's cofounder and the eighth-richest person, has a secret disaster-response team, according to The Daily Beast.

The Daily Beast's investigation found Brin was the sole donor to a disaster charity called Global Support and Development (GSD). The Daily Beast identified Brin as the company's sole donor through a California court filing.

The company's staff, almost half of whom are ex-military, are deployed to disaster areas to clear debris and use high-tech solutions to assist victims. GSD is headed up by Grant Dawson, an ex-naval lieutenant who was on Brin's personal security detail for years.

The idea for GSD was apparently sparked in 2015 when captain of Brin's superyacht "Dragonfly" was sailing past Vanuatu, which had just been hit by Cyclone Pam. The captain contacted Brin to ask if anything could be done to help, and Brin then got in touch with Dawson.   

Dawson said in a speech in 2019 about GSD: "So I grabbed a number of Air Force para-rescue guys I'd been affiliated with from the security world, and a couple of corpsmen out of the Seal teams ... We raided every Home Depot and pharmacy we could find and on about 18 hours' notice, we launched."

The Daily Beast reported that GSD now has 20 full-time staffers, plus about 100 contractors working for it.

The Daily Beast said that like at Google, GSD's employees enjoy perks, including strawberry ice cream and fresh laundry aboard a superyacht while working in disaster areas. In addition to military-trained staff, the charity has access to sophisticated technology including drones and sonar mapping.

Since 2015, GSD has assisted during several disasters, including hurricanes, earthquakes, and volcanic activity. Now the company says it is lending a hand during the coronavirus pandemic by helping set up testing in California. 

"GSD provided operational support to stand up the first two drive-through test centers in California and planning and logistic support for other test centers as they opened across the state," GSD says on its website. "Our paramedics and support staff also partnered with the Hayward, California Fire Department to perform more than 8,000 swab tests at their drive-through test site and local eldercare facilities."

Rob Reich, the codirector of Stanford University's Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, told The Daily Beast that disaster relief is good work, but it shouldn't be secretive.

"There should be an expectation of transparency to understand how his charity interacts with existing efforts at disaster relief, and so we citizens can examine whether it's consistent with what democratic institutions want to accomplish," Reich said.

GSD did not respond to The Daily Beast's request for comment, and the news organization was unsuccessful in trying to contact Brin personally.

Correction: an older version of this story said GSD arrived at disaster zones on a superyacht. This is inaccurate, and a GSD spokesperson told Business Insider it works with other nonprofits to co-ordinate relief vessels.

SEE ALSO: Google's cofounders lost almost $2 billion each after Alphabet reported lower than expected revenue. Here's how they built a combined $127 billion fortune and how they spend it.

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• A new report found that 45% of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or by their children.
• Some of the biggest Fortune 500 companies fall into that category, like Amazon, Apple, Tesla, and Alphabet, Google's parent company.
• Many of these companies spoke out against an executive order that halted work visas for immigrants.
• In late June, President Donald Trump temporarily suspended H-1B, H-2B, H-4, J-1, and L-1 visas. The White House said it would encourage companies to hire American citizens who lost their jobs during the coronavirus pandemic. 
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

President Donald Trump just suspended work visas for immigrants at a time when immigrants are making up larger swaths of the US workforce.

Trump announced Monday that he would freeze the granting of immigration visas through the end of 2020. The H-1B, H-2B, H-4, J-1, and L-1 visas — primarily used by professionals to get a job in the US — will be halted under the order.

The Trump administration hopes the measure will reserve open jobs for the millions of Americans who lost jobs from the coronavirus pandemic. But tech industry leaders said the move would undermine America's economic recovery and its competitiveness. 

They may have a point: a 2019 report finds that 45% of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or their children, among them tech heavy-hitters like Amazon, Apple, Tesla, and Google parent company Alphabet.

While the contribution of immigrants to startups has long been known, these recent findings are increasingly relevant due to Trump's anti-immigration policies, like tightening asylum rules for migrants by making it harder for family members to receive protection.

According to the report, conducted by research organization New American Economy, the 45% of companies founded by immigrants or their children generated $16.1 trillion in revenue in 2018, a higher proportion than in previous years.

The number of companies on the list has also increased: there were 204 in 2011, and 223 in 2019. Of those, 101 were founded by people born outside the US, and 122 were founded by the children of immigrants. Famous examples include Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, whose adoptive father was Cuban, and Apple cofounder Steve Jobs, whose biological father was Syrian.

Immigrant entrepreneurs under Trump

According to the Pew Research Center, the US is home to more immigrants than any other country, with the foreign-born population reaching a record 44.4 million in 2017. Immigrants are also projected to drive future growth in the working-age population by adding nearly 18 million people of working age through at least 2035.

Despite these projections, experts say the Trump administration's hardline approach to immigration is deterring newcomers. In fact, net migration to the US fell 12% from fiscal year 2017 to fiscal year 2018, according to the Census Bureau.

"Folks around the world are thinking twice about making the journey to the US to start a business or to pursue their higher education dreams,"Ali Noorani, executive director of nonprofit advocacy group National Immigration Forum, told Business Insider. "I think the Trump administration has taken a wrecking ball to our legal immigration system. Our economy, in the long run, is much less competitive."

Some Trump-era policies affecting the flow of migrants include slowing down legal immigration proceedings, according to The New York Times. Applying for a green card is more difficult, with wait times doubling since 2017.

Still, the country's favorable polices for startups and small businesses continue to be a driving force for migration to the US, the Harvard Business Review reports. This appreciation of America's opportunities not only gives immigrants a competitive edge, it helps them not take their success for granted, says Ibrahim AlHusseini, a Jordan-born serial entrepreneur.

"This idea that somehow, somebody is a real American who loves America more than someone else, and that an immigrant is here to take something away from someone is false," AlHusseini told Business Insider. "In fact, I attest that somebody who moves here from any place else in the world actually has a greater and more nuanced love for this country because they have contrast."

AlHusseini moved to the US for college, then remained after founding his first startup. In 2013 he founded FullCycle, an investment company working to reverse the effects of climate change. As an advocate for immigrant business owners, he advises entrepreneurs in other countries looking to make it big in the US to not be discouraged by the current political climate.

"Don't listen to the fear-mongering out there and realize that this is just a small bump in the road, and this is a very long road," he said. "Don't give up on that, and don't let any characters on Twitter or on television scare you off."

Ivan De Luce wrote a previous version of this story.

SEE ALSO: Trump is escalating efforts to restrict immigration by ending asylum protections for most migrants

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NOW WATCH: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella: America's immigration policy is one of our biggest competitive advantages

• UK-based sports betting firm OLBG found that it takes the average self-made billionaire 21 years to join the three comma club after starting out, but some entrepreneurs get rich faster than others.
• eBay founder Pierre Omidyar became a billionaire faster than anyone else on the Forbes Billionaires List.
• Warren Buffett's investing acumen may be highly praised, but it took a long time to make him a billionaire.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Some entrepreneurs dream up businesses that make them into billionaires virtually overnight while others work for decades to join the three comma club.

It takes the average billionaire 21 years to make their first billion, according to an analysis of the Forbes' 2020 Billionaires List by British sports betting firm OLBG. Some, like Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, do it much faster while others, such as Zara billionaire Amancio Ortega, take a bit longer to amass their massive fortunes.

No one on the 2020 Billionaires List was inducted into the three comma club faster than eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, however, who made a billion dollars in just three years after founding the online auction house.

Keep reading to see how long it took some of the richest people in the world to make their first billion, listed in order of slowest to fastest time to billionaire status.

Note: This ranking only includes self-made billionaires in the order they appeared on Forbes' 2020 Billionaires List as it was originally published in March, so those who inherited their fortunes, like the Waltons of Wal-Mart, have been excluded. OLBG determined how long each individual took to become a billionaire by subtracting the year they founded their primary business from the year Forbes declared them a billionaire.

SEE ALSO: Want to become a billionaire? Here are the industries that produce the most ultrawealthy people

DON''T MISS: The founders of Panda Express built a $3 billion fortune off of the Chinese food empire. Here's why the first-generation immigrants say the key to achieving the American dream is giving back.

11. Carlos Slim may be the richest man in Mexico, but it took him 30 years to become a billionaire.

Current net worth: $53.2 billion (attributed to Slim and his family)

Source of wealth: Telecommunications giant America Movil

Slim, 80, and several of his family members control Latin America's largest telecommunications company, per Forbes. He has also invested in construction, consumer goods, and real-estate firms in Mexico, in addition to holding a stake in The New York Times, per Forbes.

10. It took Spanish fashion mogul Amancio Ortega 26 years to join the three comma club.

Current net worth: $63.3 billion

Source of wealth: Zara parent Inditex

The 84-year-old Spaniard began his career in textile manufacturing but went on to cofound fast-fashion retailer Zara with his late wife Rosalia Mera in 1975, Business Insider previously reported.

9. Warren Buffett's conservative investing philosophy may have made him a lot of money, but it was slow going. It took Buffett 23 years to become a billionaire.

Current net worth: $72.5 billion

Source of wealth: Berkshire Hathaway conglomerate

Investor Warren Buffett made his fortune running conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway, per Forbes. The company owns fast food staple Dairy Queen and insurer Geico.

8. Fashion billionaire Bernard Arnault took 13 years to become a billionaire.

Current net worth: $112.1 billion

Source of wealth: Louis Vuitton owner LVMH

French businessman Bernard Arnault, 71, is the richest person in the fashion industry, Business Insider previously reported. However, the pandemic temporarily reversed the luxury conglomerate CEO's fortunes, sending both LVMH's share price and Arnault's net worth into a free fall.

7. and 6. It took Microsoft's Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates 12 years to become billionaires after Gates founded the software giant.

Current net worths: $113.6 billion (Gates), $72.1 billion (Ballmer)

Source of wealth: Microsoft

Bill Gates, 64, founded software giant Microsoft with his high school friend Paul Allen in 1975, Business Insider previously reported. The company made Gates a billionaire in 1986, the year after it went public, according to CNBC.

Ballmer became one of Microsoft's first employees after dropping out of Stanford Business School in 1980, Forbes reported. Ballmer's Microsoft stake also made him a billionaire. He spent 14 years as Microsoft's CEO after Gates stepped down from the top post, and now owns the Los Angeles Clippers, per Forbes.

5. Larry Ellison became a billionaire nine years after founding Oracle.

Current net worth: $72.4 billion

Source of wealth: Oracle

Larry Ellison, now 75, cofounded software firm Oracle to produce and sell customer relationship management databases, per Forbes. A two-time college dropout, Ellison is now best known as an international playboy and tech titan, Business Insider previously reported.

4. and 3. It took Google cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page six years to become billionaires.

Current net worths: $67.5 billion (Brin), $69.3 billion (Page)

Source of wealth: Google parent Alphabet

Larry Page and Sergey Brin co-founded Google in 1998 while working towards their PhDs at Stanford, per Forbes. The pair went on to spend decades atop Google parent Alphabet — with Page as CEO and Brin as president — before stepping down in December 2019.

2. Not only is Jeff Bezos worth more than any other person in history, he also nearly broke the record for becoming a billionaire the fastest. It only took him five years.

Current net worth: $183.1 billion

Source of wealth: Amazon

Jeff Bezos, 56, left his job at a New York City hedge fund to sell books on the internet in 1994. That company, called Amazon, became the world's largest retailer and made its CEO the world's richest man in the process.

1. Mark Zuckerberg might not have graduated from Harvard four years after enrolling, but he did join the three comma club in that amount of time.

Current net worth: $87.9 billion

Source of wealth: Facebook

Mark Zuckerberg, 35, founded the social network in his dorm room at Harvard, Business Insider previously reported. Zuckerberg's 15% stake in the company makes him the seventh-richest person on the planet according to Forbes, but the billionaire has said that he and wife Dr. Priscilla Chan plan to give most of their wealth away.

• The tech industry is filled with powerful stories of immigrants who made it big after moving to the United States.
• For many now-moguls, however, there were struggles and strife along the path to their success.
• Paypal cofounder Max Levchin, who was born in Ukraine, lost his accent by watching American shows on a TV he found in a dumpster.
• Jan Koum lived on food stamps and taught himself computer networking through a book he bought at a used bookstore. He would go on to sell his company, WhatsApp, for $19 billion.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

More than a third of the top tech companies in the US were founded by people born outside of the country. Their success stories drive many immigrants to come to the US in hopes of realizing the American Dream.

But just looking at their success makes it easy to overlook the fact that many immigrant tech industry giants had to overcome other problems – from language barriers to financial constraints – to achieve their extraordinary success.

Here are 13 tech leaders who struggled as immigrants but later proved the American Dream possible.

Eugene Kim contributed to a previous version of this article. 

SEE ALSO: From Tesla to Pfizer: 14 major US companies founded by immigrants

Sergey Brin had a "difficult" first year in the US.

Google cofounder Sergey Brin was just 6 years old when his family left the Soviet Union to settle in Maryland. His first memory of the US was of "sitting in the backseat of the car, amazed at all the giant automobiles on the highway," his mother Eugenia Brin told Moment Magazine.

She says Brin struggled to adjust to the new surroundings early on. He was bashful and spoke English with a heavy accent, which made the first year a "difficult year for him." 

"We were constantly discussing the fact we had been told that children are like sponges, that they immediately grasp the language and have no problem, and that wasn't the case," she said.

It may have taken Brin longer to learn English, but he ended up in Stanford's PhD program in computer science, where he met Google cofounder Larry Page. Now Google is a $1 trillion company, and Brin has a net worth of $66.5 billion, according to Forbes.

Jerry Yang only knew one English word when he arrived in the US.

Yahoo! cofounder Jerry Yang, born in Taiwan, was only 8 years old when he moved to San Jose, California, in 1976. As the story goes, Yang only knew the English word "shoe" when he first set foot in the country. He says it took him three years to become fluent in English.

But that didn't stop him from achieving academic excellence. Yang got both his bachelor's and master's in electrical engineering at Stanford University. There, he met David Filo, and together they cofounded Yahoo!, arguably the biggest internet portal in the '90s.

Yang stepped down as Yahoo CEO in 2009 and left the company in 2012. However, he was able to build an estimated net worth of $2.3 billion along the way and remains an active investor.

Jan Koum lived on food stamps before he sold WhatsApp for $19 billion.

WhatsApp cofounder Jan Koum was born in Ukraine, where grew up in a house with no hot water.

Koum was only 16 years old when his family moved to the US. They settled in Mountain View, California, where they lived on food stamps. His mother worked as a babysitter, while he was a cleaner at a local grocery store. His father died in 1997, never setting foot in Mountain View, and his mother died of cancer in 2000.

Koum taught himself computer networking through a book he bought at a used bookstore. He ended up attending San Jose State University and was later employed at Yahoo! as the company's 44th employee.

Fast-forward to 2009, Koum founded WhatsApp, a messaging app that was later acquired by Facebook for $19 billion. His estimated net worth is $9.8 billion, according to Forbes.

Max Levchin lost his accent by watching American TV shows.

Paypal cofounder Max Levchin was born in Ukraine but moved to the US when he was 16 years old. 

Levchin says his family was quite poor when they got here in 1991, and he had a strong accent while speaking English. Although he was fluent in English, Levchin had a hard time understanding all the cultural references people were making at school.

To help his cultural assimilation, Levchin relied on American TV shows. He says he found a TV in a dumpster and fixed it to watch all the TV shows he wanted to.

"That's how I lost my accent and got a crash course on 1990s American pop culture," he told Silicon Valley Business Journal.

Just seven years after settling in Chicago, Levchin cofounded PayPal in 1998 alongside Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. It was acquired by eBay for roughly $1.5 billion in 2002.

Vinod Dham, the "Father of Pentium," only had $8 in his pocket when he got to the US.

Vinod Dham is widely regarded as the "Father of Pentium," for his work at Intel, building the first flash memory chip.

But before all the fame, Dham was a poor college student just trying to make ends meet. According to Venturebeat, when Dham first came to the US in the 1970s, the Indian government gave $8 to foreign tourists.

But he was able to get off the ground, thanks to a loan from the University of Cincinnati's study abroad office. He also found a research assistant job that paid him $325. Upon graduation, Dham found a job at Intel and the rest is history.

He later served as the CEO of Silicon Spice, a company that sold for $1.2 billion in 2002. Currently, he's a venture capitalist.

Sundar Pichai had little access to a phone, computer, or the internet growing up. Now, he's Google's CEO.

According to an article by CNN, Google CEO Sundar Pichai grew up in a small, poor town in India before moving to the US to attend university. 

Pichai recalled the time after his family got their first phone. 

"It became a communal thing. People would come to call their kids," Pichai told CNN. "And so for me, it showed the power of what's possible with technology."

Pichai attended Stanford on a full scholarship and received his MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. He later worked at Applied Materials and McKinsey before joining Google in 2004. In 2015, he became the company's CEO. 

In recent years, Sundar Pichai clashed with President Trump over his immigration policies and "travel ban." 

"It's really important that we don't make it a tech-versus-the-rest-of-the-country issue," Pichai said onstage in January 2018 during a Q&A event in San Francisco organized by MSNBC when asked about immigration by the hosts Kara Swisher and Ari Melber.

He got $281 million total compensation in 2019, making him one of the world's highest-paid executives, Business Insider previously reported.

Elon Musk was born in South Africa and moved to Canada for college — he later moved to the United States and founded his first company.

Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX and Tesla, was born and raised in South Africa before obtaining Canadian citizenship in 1989. Musk speaks often about his upbringing in South Africa, detailing the struggles of growing up there.

After Musk moved to Canada to pursue his degree from Queen's University in Ontario, the now-mogul managed to survive on a mere $1 per day. He later transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned two degrees. Musk founded his first company, Zip2 Corporation, in 1995.

After he became a US citizen in 2002, Musk earned his first billion when PayPal, another company Musk founded, was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion in stock. He would later become the creative mind behind both Tesla and SpaceX. He has a current net worth of $70.5 billion. 

Sanjay Mehrotra's US visa application was rejected three times before he cofounded SanDisk.

For Sanjay Mehrotra, the cofounder of the company SanDisk, it was what he had to deal with before he even arrived in the US that set him back.

Born and raised in India, Mehrotra was accepted to UC Berkeley when he was barely 18 years old. But the US consulate in New Delhi rejected his visa application three times, before finally approving it after his father spoke to the counselor for 20 minutes. 

Mehrotra eventually finished his master's in computer science and electrical engineering at Berkeley. Right out of school, he worked for Intel, where he met SanDisk cofounder Eli Harari.

In 1988, they founded SanDisk, which was acquired by Western Digital for $16 billion in 2016.

Andy Grove escaped from Nazi rule and worked as a busboy before turning Intel into the most powerful semiconductor company in the world.

Andy Grove was born in Hungary and spent years hiding from the Nazis before arriving in the US in 1957. 

With very little money and limited English language skills, Grove had difficulty settling into his new life in the US. He worked as a busboy during his college years in New York, while his girlfriend and future wife, Eva Kastan, worked as a waitress.

Eventually, Grove earned a PhD. in chemical engineering at UC Berkeley and found a job at Fairchild Semiconductor. That job led him to an executive role at Intel in its early years, where he ended up becoming the CEO for over a decade.

Intel became the world's largest semiconductor manufacturer, and one of the most powerful tech companies ever. Steve Jobs often called Grove for personal advice.

Andy Grove passed away on March 21, 2016, at the age of 79.

Chamath Palihapitiya grew up on welfare before becoming a billionaire investor.

Chamath Palihapitiya, born in Sri Lanka, moved to Canada at the age of 6. Early on, his father was unemployed and his family lived above a laundromat, relying on welfare.

But, being less privileged only motivated Palihapitiya to work harder. He'd obsess over the Forbes' Billionaires List, daydreaming of making it big.

Finally, he got an electrical engineering degree from the University of Waterloo and quickly became one of the most successful tech leaders at a very young age. 

He was the youngest VP in AOL's history at the age of 26. He was also instrumental in Facebook's growth early on, becoming one of the longest-tenured senior executives there.

In 2011, he quit Facebook to launch his own venture capital firm called Social+Capital Partnership, which is now one of the fastest-growing VC firms in Silicon Valley.

In 2015, Chamath Palihapitiya's net worth was believed to be close to $1 billion.

Tien Tzuo lived through the mean streets of Brooklyn in the '70s.

Tien Tzuo, Zuora founder and former Salesforce CMO, and his family moved from Taiwan to Brooklyn in the 1970s. Tzuo says he was mugged a few times growing up in the borough.

However, a turbulent home environment didn't deter him from excelling at school, and Tzuo ended up earning an electrical engineering degree from Cornell University. 

He then found a job at Oracle, and later became Salesforce's 11th employee. He served in several executives roles at Salesforce, before moving on to launch his own company called Zuora in 2007.

In 2018, Zuora was valued at $2 billion, and Tien Tzuo's stake was valued at $200 million.

Mike Krieger almost gave up on Instagram because of how long his visa took.

Mike Krieger seriously considered asking his Instagram cofounder Kevin Systrom to replace him before launching the company, because he couldn't get a US work visa.

In 2010, Krieger, originally from Brazil, applied for an H1-B visa, the document needed for foreigners to legally work in the US. But even after three months of applying, he hadn't heard back and had to consider moving back to Brazil.

"It was approaching the point of hard conversations. I had moments where I was like, 'Maybe I should just tell Kevin to forget about it and find somebody who is easier to hire,'"Krieger told Bloomberg.

Eventually, Krieger obtained his H1-B visa and started working on Instagram, which he built in a matter of weeks. 

Instagram ended up getting acquired by Facebook for $1 billion in 2012. It now has more than 1 billion active users worldwide.

Christian Gheorghe was a limo driver in New York before founding a company that sold for $500 million.

Christian Gheorghe, CEO of business analytics software Tidemark, is a serial entrepreneur who sold his previous startup to SAP for $500 million.

Before his success, Gheorghe was a limo driver in New York City. It was during one of those rides that he met Andrew Saxe, his future business partner who helped him build a company that sold to Experian a few years later.

In Romania, where he grew up, Gheorghe sold music records and taught himself English by listening to American music. He also taught himself to code by hacking into video games on knock-off PCs.

• Read more:
• Here's how immigration in the US has changed over the past 2 centuries
• These 15 immigrants became millionaires and billionaires after coming to the US
• 13 people who came to America with nothing and made a fortune

• The 12 richest Americans are now worth more than $1 trillion, according to an analysis from the Institute for Policy Studies.
• During the pandemic, their combined wealth has increased by $283 billion, a jump of nearly 40%, according to the report.
• Elon Musk saw the biggest gains, tripling his personal fortune as Tesla's stock has surged this year.
• The list is dominated by other titans of the tech industry including Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Google's cofounders. 
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

America's richest individuals are getting richer and showing no signs of slowing down during the pandemic.

The trend is most prominent among the dozen wealthiest Americans, whose collective net worth passed $1 trillion last week, according to a new analysis from the Institute for Policy Studies using data from Forbes and Bloomberg's billionaire trackers.

Since March 18, around the time the pandemic first started wreaking havoc on the US economy, the country's top 12 wealthiest people have seen their personal fortunes skyrocket alongside COVID-19 cases, raking in an additional $283 billion — an increase of nearly 40% — the IPS report found.

By comparison, US household wealth during the first quarter plummeted by 5.6%, the largest drop since the 1950s, and more than half of US households have lost income this year.

Wealth and income inequality in the US had already hit record highs before the pandemic. But in a sign that economic fallout from the coronavirus has further concentrated wealth at the top, data from the US Federal Reserve shows that the top 1% of Americans actually saw their share of overall wealth in the US decrease from 29.3% to 27.8% during the first quarter of 2020, even as those at the very top saw massive gains.

In particular, those gains have gone to the executives and founders of the largest US tech companies, which surged past Wall Street expectations last quarter despite declining revenues. Of the 12 wealthiest Americans included in IPS's analysis, eight hail from the tech industry.

They include Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos (with a net increase since March of $76.5 billion), Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates ($16.1 billion), Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg ($40.8 billion), Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk ($48.5 billion), former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer ($18.8 billion), Oracle founder Larry Ellison ($11.9 billion), and Google cofounders Larry Page ($16.5 billion) and Sergey Brin ($16.5 billion).

While Bezos has been the biggest beneficiary of the pandemic in terms of largest net worth increase, Musk saw the highest percentage gains with a 228% boost, taking his personal fortune from $24.6 billion pre-pandemic to $73.1 billion as of August 13, according to IPS.

Musk's wealth climbed another $8 billion Monday as Tesla stock soared to an all-time high, making him the fourth wealthiest person in the world.

Others on IPS' list included Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett ($13.1 billion increase), and Walmart heirs Alice Walton ($8.2 billion), Jim Walton ($7.7 billion), and Rob Walton ($7.9 billion).

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• Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin stepped down as heads of Alphabet in 2019.
• The pair had the idea for Alphabet — a holding company that houses Google, DeepMind, Waymo, and other businesses — while visiting Warren Buffett more than 10 years ago.
• "The genesis of Alphabet is a meeting that Larry and Sergey and I had about a decade ago where we flew — technically, I flew them, shocking — to Omaha, and we visited Warren Buffett," former Google CEO Eric Schmidt said at Alphabet's annual meeting in 2017.
• Following Berkshire Hathaway's formula of trusting managers to run its businesses, Alphabet built a "corporate scaling mechanism that we've never seen in the world," Schmidt said.
• View Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

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Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin stepped down as heads of Alphabet in 2019. They had the idea for the holding company — created in 2015 to house Google, DeepMind, Waymo, and other businesses — while visiting Warren Buffett more than 10 years ago.

"The genesis of Alphabet is a meeting that Larry and Sergey and I had about a decade ago where we flew — technically, I flew them, shocking — to Omaha, and we visited Warren Buffett," Google's former CEO, Eric Schmidt, told the crowd at Alphabet's annual meeting in 2017.

"I remember sitting on, I think, the 14th floor and being struck by the extraordinary success of his model," Schmidt continued. "He had figured out a problem that had bedeviled all of us in our industry for years, which was how to establish scalability, right?'

"He had a particular formula, which was the independence of the companies, strong CEOs, independent operation, and strong branding of those corporations," Schmidt added. Following the famed investor's example, Alphabet built a "corporate scaling mechanism that we've never seen in the world," he said.

Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway owns dozens of businesses including Geico, Dairy Queen, and See's Candies. The so-called Oracle of Omaha trusts managers to run the companies with minimal oversight, freeing him to focus on the big picture and smartly allocate capital across the conglomerate.

Alphabet's bosses drew a few distinctions between their company's structure and its inspiration.

Berkshire has largely avoided the tech sector and focused on proven, profitable companies with competitive advantages, such as Coca-Cola. In contrast, Alphabet has invested in self-driving cars, smart contact lenses, solar-powered drones, internet-beaming hot air balloons, and other high-risk "moonshots."

"It's different types of businesses than in the Berkshire family of companies," finance chief Ruth Porat told an analyst at the annual meeting in 2017.

Another analyst asked whether Alphabet's management team took up a single floor like Berkshire's top brass.

"It's maybe a quarter of a floor," legal boss David Drummond replied. "Ruth and I visited the headquarters several months ago in Omaha, and we realized that our Alphabet staff was actually much, much smaller than Berkshire Hathaway's."

Page and Brin have taken pages out of Buffett's book before. In Google's IPO prospectus in 2004, the pair included a section titled "Letter from the Founders: 'An Owner's Manual' for Google's Shareholders."

In a footnote, they wrote: "Much of this was inspired by Warren Buffett's essays in his annual reports and his 'An Owner's Manual' to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders."

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Alphabet far surpassed analyst estimates with diluted EPS of $22.30 for quarter four of 2020. Analysts expected $15.58, a gain over quarter four 2019's $15.35.

In late 2019, current CEO of Alphabet Sundar Pichai transitioned from being the CEO of just Google to the CEO of the entire firm. This coincided with Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page stepping away from their positions as CEO and President of Alphabet, respectively. At the time, Brin and Page said that it was "time to assume the role of proud parents—offering advice and love, but not daily nagging."

Alphabet's remaining top executives, including Pichai, CFO Ruth Porat, and Chief Legal Officer David Drummond continued to lead the firm into 2020. It's worth noting that Drummond isn't part of this team anymore — his retirement was effective on January 31, 2020, amid accusations of his having multiple relationships with subordinates.

Let's dig into Alphabet's compensation.

Alphabet's executive compensation

Each year, the SEC requires public companies to disclose compensation for top executives. This disclosure is included in a document called a proxy statement. According to Alphabet's most recent proxy statement, its executives made between $1.00 and $280 million in total 2019 compensation. 

In the charts below, we show compensation for each executive as it was presented in the summary compensation table in Alphabet's proxy statement, split out by element. Hold your cursor over the labels at the top to highlight the different parts of the executives' compensation, and reference the bulleted list below for more information on each compensation element.

The chart below shows Alphabet's executive compensation. Note that Pichai's massive $276.6 million equity awards in 2019 dwarf compensation for the other executives.

To get a better view of compensation for the rest of the disclosed executives, this chart shows Alphabet's executive compensation, excluding Pichai's. 

In 2019, Pichai received three separate equity awards — one performance-based equity award worth $90 million, the amount of which vests, or becomes available to Pichai to use, based on total shareholder return performance between 2019 and 2022, and two time-based awards together worth $150 million, meaning they become available to Pichai on certain dates. In total, Pichai's stock awards were valued at $276.6 million. 

Other executives received no equity awards in 2019 (but both received equity awards of $46.6 million in 2018). 

What the terms in the chart mean:

• Salary: The salary an executive earns in a given year.
• Stock awards/option awards: Equity awards based on achievement within a firm's long-term incentive plan. Long-term incentives are also considered "at-risk" pay. Stock and option awards are two different types of equity awards — stocks are direct equity awards, while options give the executive the right to buy shares at a specific price.
• NEIP: Typically cash grants for performance in the short term. Bonuses are typically one-off awards, while anything in the column titled NEIP (nonequity incentive plan) typically means the awards are granted as part of a firm's short-term incentive plan and granted in cash (hence the "nonequity" label). Short-term incentives are thought of as part of "at-risk" pay, meaning that the executive must hit goals or benchmarks to receive the award.
• Other compensation: This number includes any value from the compensation data related to pension plans or nonqualified deferred-compensation earnings. It also includes any payments designated as "other compensation," which can include payment for things like personal or home security, employees' benefits plans, country-club fees, fees related to use of company aircraft, and even relocation expenses. 

SEE ALSO: Google CEO Sundar Pichai says company infighting spilled into public view because it's more transparent than rivals

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Jeff Bezos started Amazon in his garage in 1994 as a way to sell books online. In 26 years as its CEO, he transformed the company into a behemoth in ecommerce, web services, logistics, robotics, groceries, AI, media, and more. 

On Tuesday, Bezos said he will step down as CEO in the third quarter of 2021, passing the reins to Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy and taking a backseat as executive chairman of Amazon's board of directors.

Before the pandemic hit, Bezos had spent several years mostly focused on long-term projects. and said in his letter to employees Tuesday that he plans to shift that focus to "other passions" like his space startup Blue Origin, philanthropies (Day 1 Fund and Earth Fund), and The Washington Post, which he acquired in 2013.

Bezos' plans track closely with those of other high-profile tech founders who ran, and eventually left, their own startups-turned-tech-giants to pursue pet projects and philanthropic endeavors.

He was also one of the few remaining founder-CEOs of a generation of tech companies born in the past 50 years that played major roles in bringing computers, the internet, ecommerce, and social networking to the masses. That shrinking crowd still includes Facebook CEO and cofounder Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter CEO and cofounder Jack Dorsey, and Netflix co-CEO and cofounder Reed Hastings.

But Apple, Google, Microsoft, and others have since bid farewell to the founders who had led their companies for years. Here's what those tech icons are up to now.

Apple cofounder Steve Jobs died in 2011.

After Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak founded Apple in 1976, the company had a long line of CEOs. Jobs was eventually ousted after a failed board takeover in 1985, before returning in 1996 with a successful board takeover, eventually transforming the struggling company into the $2.3 trillion giant it is today.

Jobs left Apple in early 2011 as his health deteriorated, turning over the reins to CEO Tim Cook. Jobs died of pancreatic cancer in October 2011.

Wozniak, who left Apple in 1985 but is still technically an employee and is paid $50 per week, has since started multiple companies. Most recently, he launched a cryptocurrency business that helps companies raise money for eco-friendly projects, according to CNBC.

Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates is working on global health initiatives through his philanthropy.

Bill Gates and Paul Allen cofounded Microsoft in 1975, and by the time Gates stepped down as CEO in 2000, he had helped build the company into such a dominant player in the tech industry that it became the subject of one of the biggest antitrust cases ever.

Gates stayed on the company's board until March 2020, when he said he would focus full-time on his philanthropic work for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Gates has pledged to give away a majority of his wealth within his lifetime — though he and 75% of signatories of the "Giving Pledge" have actually become wealthier since signing on.

Gates has for years focused on global health and warned about the dangers of pandemics, and the Gates Foundation has poured $1.75 billion into coronavirus-related causes.

Google cofounder Larry Page is working on secretive flying-car startups.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google in 1998, and Page led the company until 2001, when Eric Schmidt was brought in as "adult supervision." But Page stepped back in as CEO in 2011 and eventually became the CEO of its parent company Alphabet in 2015, working mostly on "moonshot" projects and recruiting talented people.

Page and Brin stepped down as Alphabet CEO and President in December 2019, with then-Google CEO Sundar Pichai taking over, though both remain on the board. Page has since focused mostly on his investments in flying-car startups Zee.Aero and Kitty Hawk.

eBay founder Pierre Omidyar has invested in media, social impact fintech startups, and a basic income experiment.

Pierre Omidyar launched Auction Web, which ultimately became eBay, in 1995. The company eventually brought in Meg Whitman as CEO in 1998, and Omidyar stayed on the company's board until September 2020.

After leaving day-to-day operations at eBay, Omidyar — a Hawai'i resident — started a local investigative journalism outlet, the Honolulu Civil Beat, and founded First Look Media, a digital journalism company that owns The Intercept. He also launched a $300 million fund to back social impact-focused fintech startups, and has given to a range of philanthropic causes, including basic income and pandemic response.

AOL co-founder and CEO Steve Case got into venture capital and philanthropy.

America Online, known to most people as AOL, was founded from the ashes of its short-lived predecessor, Control Video Corporation, by Jim Kimsey, Marc Seriff, and Steve Case.

Case ran AOL from 1991 until 2001, when the company completed its — ultimately ill-fated — merger with Time Warner, becoming chairman of the combined company until resigning that position in 2003 amid criticism from investors.

After leaving AOL's board outright in 2005, Case launched a venture capital firm, Revolution, that has focused on funding startups outside of Silicon Valley. He has also launched a philanthropic foundation and chairs the board of the Smithsonian Institute.

Singapore is becoming a hub for billionaires looking to set up new branches of their family offices thanks to ample incentives and low taxes in the city-state.

According to a report from Bloomberg's David Ramli, Google cofounder Sergey Brin's family office has established a base in Singapore. His firm, Bayshore Global Management, set up the office at the end of 2020, according to documents viewed by Bloomberg. 

Brin cofounded Google with Larry Page in 1998 and is the world's eighth-richest person with a net worth of $91.7 billion, according to Bloomberg's Billionaires Index. Brin, who served as president of Alphabet, Google's parent company, and Page, who was CEO, announced in December 2019 that they were stepping down from their day-to-day roles.

But both Brin and Page retained their shares— 25.1% and 25.9%, respectively — which gives them a majority stake in the company. 

As Bloomberg's Peggy Collins reported in 2015, Bayshore Global Management is named after North Bayshore, the area in Mountain View, California, where Google is based. 

Read more:Google's founders have vanished as the company goes to war with Washington. It's yet another mess for Sundar Pichai to clean up.

While Brin is the most recent billionaire flocking to Singapore, he's not the only one. Ray Dalio, the founder and co-chief of hedge fund Bridgewater Associates, is also setting up a family office in Singapore, Bloomberg reported last year, while James Dyson, the inventor of the Dyson vacuum cleaner, already has an office there.

Dyson set up a home base for his firm, Weybourne Group, following his decision in 2019 to relocate his company's headquarters to Singapore. Dyson also purchase Singapore's largest and most expensive penthouse for a reported $54 million that year, but has since sold it at a loss of around $7 million.

So what is it about Singapore that's attracting some of the world's best-known billionaires? A combination of factors: Singapore has famously low taxes, which has helped turn the city-state into an economic hub. Singapore is also becoming a haven for family offices, which help the wealthy manage and preserve their wealth, because of low costs and other incentives. 

While the influx family offices for US billionaires is recent, Singapore's tax structure has attracted tech bigwigs in the past. In 2012, Facebook cofounder Eduardo Saverin famously gave up his US passport for Singaporean residency ahead of the company's IPO. Saverin experienced significantly lower income taxes and no capital gains tax as a result, and he's currently worth about $14 billion. 

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NOW WATCH: July 15 is Tax Day — here's what it's like to do your own taxes for the very first time

Anne Wojcicki is about to join the ranks of billionaire CEOs minted in Silicon Valley.

Wojcicki's genetic testing startup, 23andMe, is going public in a reverse merger with a blank-check holding company owned by Richard Branson. The deal could value the 15-year-old company at $3.6 billion. Wojcicki's stake in the company could be worth $1.05 billion once the deal officially closes.

The SPAC follows an unexpected year for Wojcicki, 47, and the company she cofounded: Despite a round of layoffs in early 2020, Wojcicki in February told Insider's Megan Hernbroth and Lydia Ramsey Pflanzer that the pandemic reinvigorated the lagging consumer-genetics industry. Even so, 23andMe's revenue has been dropping over the years, according to regulatory filings released as the company prepares to go public. 

Read more: 23andMe is going public. We spoke with its CEO about its road to IPO, and what the future holds for the consumer-genetics industry.

With Wojcicki gearing up to take 23andMe public, here's a look back at how she got her start and built a genetic-testing empire. 

Wojcicki was born and raised in Palo Alto, California

Both of Wojcicki's parents are academics: her father, Stanley, chaired Stanford University's physics department; her mother, Esther, taught journalism at Palo Alto High School. Wojcicki's sister Janet also works in academia as a professor of epidemiology at the University of California, San Francisco.

Wojcicki's other sister, Susan, is the CEO of YouTube. 

"My parents really looked at us always as like mini adults," Anne Wojcicki told CNBC Make It in 2018. "I think the one thing that my parents really did is they gave us a taste of freedom. And they encouraged it. They encouraged us to find our passions, they weren't controlling." 

Wojcicki played ice hockey growing up — she told Fast Company in 2013 that she switched to the sport after figure skating "started to be a little bit like Honey Boo Boo on ice"— and later attended Yale University. She graduated in 1996 with a biology degree, according to The New York Times.

After graduating from Yale, she pursued a career on Wall Street

Post-graduation, Wojcicki began working for a biotech-related hedge fund. She told Fast Company that her academic parents were offended by the choice. 

"It was always embarrassing to come home. People were like, 'Oh, Anne, you Wall Street girl,'" she told Fast Company. 

Wojcicki worked on Wall Street for about a decade as a healthcare analyst at firms including Investor AB and Passport Capital. 

Wojcicki launched 23andMe in 2006

Along with Linda Avey and Paul Cusenza, Wojcicki founded 23andMe with the goal of providing the ability for people to look at their own genome and understand what it means. (Avey and Cusenza have since left the company.)

23andMe received backing from Google, GlaxoSmithKline, Sequoia Capital, Johnson & Johnson, and others. In total, the company has raised over $873 million in funding.

23andMe's saliva tests — which can test for genetic predispositions, ancestry, and inherited traits — initially cost $999, but now costs as low as $99. 

Things took a turn for the company when, in 2013, the Food and Drug Administration sent 23andMe a warning letter, calling its spit collection vial "an unapproved medical device" and placing limits on genetic testing for consumers. The company stopped providing health analyses based on consumers' DNA and was limited to offering only ancestry results.

By 2015, the company overcame regulatory hurdles and was able to begin offering health information to customers once again. 

Since then, 23andMe has partnered with GSK; has created tests that can detect if consumers have an elevated risk of developing diseases like Parkinson's or Alzheimer's; and is working on creating its own drugs for conditions like cancer or heart disease.

Wojcicki married Google cofounder Sergey Brin in 2007

Wojcicki met Brin through her sister, Susan: In 1998, Susan Wojcicki rented Brin and Google cofounder Larry Page her garage in Menlo Park, California, in order work on their young company, Google. 

While they were dating, Brin would leave Anne Wojcicki notes in Braille about where to meet or leave her voicemails in Morse code, Wojcicki told The New York Times in 2017.

Wojcicki and Brin married in May 2007 in a super-secret ceremony in the Bahamas. According to the San Jose Mercury News, guests weren't told the location of the wedding and were instead flown to the Bahamas on the jet owned by Page and Brin. Once there, they were taken by boat to a sandbar where the ceremony was held — Wojcicki and Brin wore white and black swimsuits, respectively, and swam out to the ceremony site. 

The couple had two kids together whose last name is Wojin, a portmanteau of their parents' last names.

Wojcicki and Brin separated in 2013 and divorced in 2015. It later came out that around the time of the separation, Brin started an affair with a Google employee in her mid-20s, who was also in a relationship with another high-level Google executive at the time.

Wojcicki told The Times that one person who helped her through her divorce from Brin was Ivanka Trump, who she described as "super-supportive."

Wojcicki later dated former Major League Baseball player Alex Rodriguez

The couple met through friends around 2015 and dated for about two years.

Wojcicki told The Times in 2017 that Rodriguez was "a really sweet guy," smart, and a good person, but that their respective parenting obligations and lives on opposite coasts made the relationship unsustainable.

Wojcicki's mom, Esther, told The Times that while she liked Rodriguez, the pairing was "a mismatch."

"He had no academic background. We couldn't have an intellectual conversation about anything," Esther Wojcicki said. "I wish J-Lo all the luck in the world."

Wojcicki has said she lives frugally and doesn't like 'froufrou things'

Brin is worth $91.3 billion, according to Bloomberg's Billionaires Index, but Wojcicki told The Times in 2017 that she's not a fan of "fancy cars and houses and the right dress." She sometimes has her kids sleep in their clothes to save time in the mornings and wear their clothes into the shower on trips to save on hotel laundry costs. 

She said at the time that she cuts her kids' hair herself, mostly shops at Payless for shoes, and rides her bike to work. 

"It's so easy to be like, 'I don't have to do laundry again. I don't have to cook again.' But then you're not normal," she told The Times.

Wojcicki is also fitness-obsessed, riding her Peloton bike, taking two daily walks, and doing online yoga classes during the pandemic. Forbes wrote in 2019 that 23andMe's headquarters "looks like a cross between a Silicon Valley startup and a fitness club."

Wojcicki gave birth to her third child, a daughter, in July 2019

Wojcicki told Forbes while she was pregnant that she decided to have the baby by herself because she wanted a third child. "So like, guess what? I executed," she said.

"Whether you're in a relationship or not should not dictate whether or not you have the ability to have children," Wojcicki told Forbes. "I'm very stubborn. When there's something I want to do, I get it done."

After the birth of her daughter, Wojcicki became outspoken about the need to normalize breastfeeding and offer support to new mothers. She told the Washington Post in 2019 that 23andMe has created a support system for parents or hopeful parents, including on-site breastfeeding rooms, a 1,500-square-foot playroom for employees' kids, and benefits for parents that include paid parental leave, fertility benefits, adoption assistance, and surrogacy reimbursement. 

"I'm in a luxurious position where I can do this, and normalizing it is part of how I can help people," she said. 

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The Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are now worth more than $100 billion each, thanks to surging tech stocks.

Page and Brin join six other centibillionaires: Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, the Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates, LVMH CEO Bernard Arnault, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett.

Page is worth $103.6 billion, while Brin is worth $100.2 billion, according to estimates by Bloomberg's Billionaire Index.

Read more: Google, Facebook, and Amazon face fresh scrutiny from a new UK competition watchdog that wants to curb their power

Brin's fortune grew by $20.4 billion in the year to April 2021, while Page's rose by $21.2 billion, according to Bloomberg's calculations. Tech shares have risen rapidly since the start of the pandemic, and those in Google's parent company, Alphabet, have grown by more than 80% over the past year.

The pair owns controlling shares in Alphabet, with more than 50% of the total votes between them. The company brought in $46.43 billion in revenue for the fourth quarter of 2020, minus traffic-acquisition costs, up from $37.57 billion a year ago. Alphabet credited this to people using YouTube and Google Search more during the pandemic.

Page and Brin have stepped back from Google and Alphabet

Page and Brin started working on Google in 1996 while they were Ph.D. students at Stanford University alongside an unofficial "third founder," who left before it became a company. It's now the most-used website in the world.

In 2015, the pair founded the holding company Alphabet to manage both Google and other subsidiaries, including Waymo, DeepMind, and Sidewalk Labs. Brin became the president of the new company, and Page became its CEO. Page appointed Sundar Pichai to take over as CEO of Google.

In 2019, Page and Brin announced plans to step back from Alphabet and appointed Pichai as CEO. Pichai still consults the cofounders regularly, though they've had an increasingly hands-off approach, Insider's Hugh Langley has reported.

Page and Brin took salaries of $1 during their time at Google.

Alongside spending their fortunes on mansions, superyachts, and a 50-person plane, the duo also led an investment round of $40 million in Elon Musk's Tesla in 2006.

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If Sergey Brin has anything to do with it, the future of humanitarian aid could come in the form of giant airships roaming the skies. 

Brin, the Google cofounder worth over $99 billion, has been working on a secretive airship company for over four years. Known as LTA Research and Exploration — "LTA" being short for "lighter than air"— the company got its start inside NASA's Ames Research Center in 2017. Over the past four years, LTA Research has worked to bring its vision of zero-emission aircrafts to life. 

Here's where Brin's interest in airships began and everything we know so far about his venture. 

Brin has long had an affinity for all types of aircraft

Back in 2005, Brin and his Google cofounder, Larry Page, made an unusual purchase: a Boeing 767-200, a wide-body jet capable of carrying 180 passengers. The pair refurbished the plane to accommodate 50 passengers and serve as their executive jet, a far cry from the standard, and significantly smaller, Gulfstream jet typically favored by executives. 

According to court documents that were later published by The Wall Street Journal, Page and Brin ended up arguing over what type of beds to put in the so-called "party plane," and they also wanted to install features like hammocks and a cocktail lounge. 

Brin's interest in aircraft extended beyond a company jet: In 2012, during the launch of Google Glass, Brin had a team of skydivers leap from a Zeppelin hovering over San Francisco. The skydivers captured footage on the headset and Brin aired it live onstage. 

Brin also oversaw the development of various types of aircraft during his time at X, Google's moonshot lab. Projects under the X umbrella included Loon, a way to deliver internet connectivity via balloons; Makani, which planned to provide electricity using kites; and Wing, a drone delivery project. Loon and Makani have since been shut down. 

Brin started working on LTA while he was still president of Alphabet, Google's parent company

According to a 2017 Bloomberg story by Ashlee Vance, Brin decided to build his own airship in 2014 after visiting the Ames Research Center, which is located near Google's Mountain View, California, headquarters.

Ames was previously home to the USS Macon, a massive airship built by the US Navy in the 1930s — it was that airship that inspired Brin's project, according to Bloomberg. The USS Macon, called "Queen of the Skies," later crashed into the Pacific Ocean 45 miles off the coast of San Francisco, essentially ending the Navy's airship program.

In 2017, Insider revealed that LTA had paid $131,000 to lease hangar space from Alphabet. The hangar was located at Moffett Field, a NASA airfield adjacent to Ames that's currently operated by Google. 

In December 2019, Brin and Page stepped away from their duties at Alphabet.

LTA plans to build a massive, expensive airship

According to a 2017 report from The Guardian's Mark Harris, the airship is expected to be nearly 200 meters long, equivalent to about 656 feet or nearly two football fields in length. 

By comparison, the infamous Hindenburg Zeppelin was 245 meters long, which is longer than three Boeing 747s. 

Sources told The Guardian that at the time, LTA was being funded by Brin himself, to the tune of over $100 million. It's not clear, four years later, how much Brin has spent on the airships.

The airship will be used for humanitarian missions

The aircraft will be used to used to bring humanitarian aid, including food and supplies, to remote areas of the world — because airships wouldn't require a traditional airport runway to land, the blimp could theoretically reach regions that are otherwise inaccessible. 

"With these next-generation airships, we strive to improve humanitarian aid delivery and reduce carbon emissions, while providing economic opportunity and new jobs to Americans,"LTA's website reads.  

According to The Guardian, Brin also wanted the blimp to be luxuriously appointed so it could serve as an "intercontinental air yacht" for his friends and family. 

LTA's airship will also be more climate-friendly than an airplane

According to SFGate's Madeline Wells, airships are faster than cargo ships and produce 80% to 90% fewer emissions than traditional aircraft. 

LTA says on its website that its goal is to eventually build "a family of aircraft with zero emissions." 

Airships like the Goodyear blimp have been filled with helium since the Hindenburg disaster — the Hindenburg relied on hydrogen to lift it off the ground, but hydrogen is extremely flammable.

But LTA appears to be revisiting the use of hydrogen with its aircraft. A recent LTA job listing spotted by TechCrunch stated that the company was looking for a hydrogen program manager — according to TechCrunch, the company wants to develop its own massive hydrogen fuel cell, which would weigh less than a lithium-ion battery and be powerful enough that the airship could cross oceans.

LTA would still rely on helium in order to lift the aircraft off the ground, TechCrunch reports.

An LTA airship could take to the skies in 2021

TechCrunch reports that LTA has already built a prototype aircraft called Pathfinder 1. The airship will still be powered by lithium-ion batteries, have 12 electric motors, and be capable of transporting 14 passengers.

It may be ready to fly as soon as this year, according to TechCrunch. 

LTA has also been contributing the nation's COVID-19 response

The company says on its website that it used the laser cutters and 3D printers at its facilities in Mountain View and Akron, Ohio, to produce roughly 150 components for face shields per day, contributing over 250,000 free face shields to hospitals, medical practices, and emergency workers nationwide in the early months of the pandemic.

LTA later partnered with NGOs around the world, ultimately providing over 5 million face shields globally, the company says. 

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Billionaires are often known for their luxurious lifestyles and high profile gadgets.

Some billionaires, like Elon Musk and Bill Gates, buy private planes to take control of the open skies — others purchase yachts to access the open seas.

From Amazon founder Jeff Bezos to Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison, and Google cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, many leaders in tech have created their own mini vacation hubs at sea, decking their boats with amenities like gyms, spas, pools, nightclubs, and movie theaters.

If you want to find out what life is like aboard these multi-million-dollar yachts, some of them are available to rent out for a few nights or weeks at a time. For instance, chartering the yacht owned by Alphabet President Sergey Brin has cost past customers $773,000 a week.

Take a look at some of the yachts owned by tech billionaires.

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Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is building his own 127-meter yacht, according to a new book. The yacht is so massive it has an additional "support yacht" with its own helipad.

Bezos has long been interested in yachts. In 2019, he was spotted aboard entertainment mogul David Geffen's superyacht.

Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison owns a 288-foot yacht named Musashi that he acquired in 2013.

Source: Forbes

Ellison has owned several superyachts over the years, including the Katana, the Ronin, and the Rising Sun.

The Oracle cofounder also has a knack for competitive yacht racing, and helped to found and back a racing team, called Oracle Team USA, in 2000. The team has found success and won several prestigious titles over the years.

Source: Telegraph

Ellison previously owned a bigger, 454-foot yacht called Rising Sun, which was designed specifically for the CEO in 2005. That yacht reportedly has 82 rooms, a movie theater, a wine cellar, and a basketball court. However, Ellison sold off the Rising Sun to Geffen for a reported $300 million.

Source: Forbes, Boat International

Ellison's boat, Musashi, is a sister ship to the yacht of another billionaire, former Sears CEO Eddie Lampert. However, the yacht, named Fountainhead, is often mistaken for belonging to billionaire investor Mark Cuban. "The guy who owns the boat tells everyone that it's mine," Cuban told Page Six in 2016. "It's so crazy ... I don't even own a boat."

Source: Page Six

Ellison's yacht reportedly influenced the decision of late Apple CEO Steve Jobs to get a boat himself. However, Jobs never set foot on the boat — the yacht was commissioned in 2008, but wasn't completed until 2012, a year after his death.

Source: Business Insider

When Jobs died in 2011, his yacht — along with his $14.1 billion fortune — was inherited by his wife, Laurene Powell Jobs, founder and president of a social-impact nonprofit called the Emerson Collective. The 256-foot yacht in named Venus, and is worth $130 million.

Source: Business Insider

Google's cofounders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, are two of the richest people in the world, at No. 10 and No. 14, respectively. The two billionaires are known to splurge: In addition to each owning a super yacht, they both own private planes as well.

Sources: Forbes, Business Insider

Page owns a yacht named Senses, a $45 million 194-foot boat that he bought in 2011 from a New Zealand businessman. The yacht has a private beach club with a Jacuzzi and sun beds, both indoor and outdoor dining areas, and a helicopter pad.

Source: Boat International

Meanwhile, Brin owns a longer, 240-foot yacht that he bought for a cool $80 million in 2011. It's reportedly the world's fastest super yacht, and is equipped with a dance floor and open-air movie theater.

Source: Business Insider

Brin's yacht is named Dragonfly. The boat shares a name with Google's once-secret project to launch a censored search engine in China. Google said in 2019 it had officially terminated the project.

Source: Business Insider, Forbes

But Brin and Page aren't the only two high-powered Google figures with yachts. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt owns a 194-foot yacht name Oasis. The yacht reportedly features a pool and a gym-turned-nightclub. He bought the boat in 2009 for a reported $72.3 million.

Sources: Business Insider, GQ

For Skype cofounder Niklas Zennstrom, his interest in yachts skews toward racing and competitive sailing. Zennstrom has gone through a succession of boats all named Ran, and his most recent purchase is the seventh in the series.

Source: CNN

The latest yacht, appropriately named Ran VII, is the most technologically advanced of all of Zennstrom's boats. The racing yacht uses electrical power, which Zennstrom says makes it "lighter, less drag, quieter, and most importantly it is environmentally friendly."

Source: CNN

The 40-foot yacht will compete in regattas through the racing team owned by Zennstrom and his wife, Catherine. The Ran racing team launched in 2008, and has won some prestigious regattas.

Source: CNN

Barry Diller, chairman of digital media company IAC, co-owns a $70 million yacht with his wife, fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg.

Source: Business Insider

The sailing yacht, named Eos, is 350 feet long with six bedrooms. The power couple has hosted many celebrities over the years — a few that have been spotted aboard Eos include model Karlie Kloss, actor Bradley Cooper, journalist Anderson Cooper, and singer Harry Styles.

Source: W Magazine

For Jim Clark, the cofounder of Netscape, one yacht hasn't been enough. Clark has owned boats for more than 30 years, and in 2012, he put up two of his sailing yachts for sale.

Source: Business Insider

Clark listed the boats for a combined $113 million: the 136-foot Hanuman for $18 million, and the 295-foot Athena for $95 million. However, as of 2016, Clark had yet to offload Athena. Clark also previously owned a 155-foot yacht named Hyperion, and currently also owns a racing yacht named Comanche.

Source: Boat International

Charles Simonyi worked at Microsoft until 2002, and oversaw the creation of Microsoft Office software. A few years before he left, Simonyi decided to purchase a yacht. He told the designer that wanted his yacht to be "home away from [his] home in Seattle."

Source: Boat International

The product of that conversation in 1999 is Simonyi's yacht named Skat, meaning "treasure" in Danish. The yacht measures 233 feet long, and is unique with its nontraditional design and gray color. Skat features a matching gray helicopter, a gym, and motorcycles.

Source: Yacht Charter Fleet

Opulent British billionaire Richard Branson owned a yacht until he sold it in September 2018. The 105-foot catamaran sold for $3 million, significantly lower than the $9.6 million price Branson listed the boat for in 2014.

Source: Business Insider

Branson, the founder of Virgin Group, bought the boat in 2009. He named it Necker Belle, a nod to his private Caribbean island, Necker Island.

Source: Business Insider

In just a few short weeks, Jeff Bezos will take the riskiest flight of his life, one that takes him 62 miles above Earth, right to the edge of space. 

The soon-to-be-ex-Amazon CEO is something of an adventurer, what with his trips out to sea or to the bottom of caves. But that doesn't exactly make him unique among his peers — in fact, a passion for extreme experiences seems to be a common trait among the world's billionaires. 

Read more: These 4 companies are leading the charge in 'space vacations' — from giant balloon flights to orbital hotels

And Bezos isn't even the only executive with a passion for space travel. Elon Musk, Richard Branson, Paul Allen, and Sergey Brin have all expressed an interest in leaving planet Earth. 

But while outer space appears to be the dominant source of fascination for the world's most powerful people, there are plenty of other billionaires with extreme pursuits of their own. 

Jeff Bezos has used his extensive resources to fund extreme trips — and now, space travel.

While Bezos made his $200 billion fortune redefining retail, it seems his true passion lies in more extreme pursuits. 

The Amazon CEO has spent his vacation time over the years on a range of unusual and, oftentimes exclusive pursuits: He went on a 50-mile horseback ride through West Texas alongside his father and his brother, Mark; he's rappelled hundreds of feet down into dark caves, equipped with a harness and a headlamp; and he once spent three weeks at sea recovering pieces of the engine of the Apollo 11 spacecraft, which took the first humans to the moon.

He was even once involved in a serious helicopter crash, which reportedly turned him off of helicopters for years (although he seems to have since rekindled his interest in the aircraft).

But in just a few weeks, Bezos will embark on his most extreme adventure yet: Taking an 11-minute flight to the edge of space onboard a Blue Origin spacecraft. Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000 with the goal of democratizing human spaceflight, and the trip on July 20 will be the culmination of a lifelong obsession with space. 

Richard Branson is known for his outlandish stunts and his passion for space tourism.

Branson is known for daredevilish antics: He jumped off the Palms Casino in Las Vegas in 2007, he kitesurfed the English Channel in 2012 (an activity he's also performed with a naked model on his back), and he became the first man to cross both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans in a hot air balloon.

In 2011, he launched Virgin Oceanic with the goal of exploring the deepest parts of the world's oceans, although that venture has since been scrapped. 

Perhaps more ambitious than Branson's underwater pursuits, however, are his goals for space tourism. His space venture, Virgin Galactic, is focused on suborbital tourism where passengers can pay $200,000 to $250,000 for a luxurious trip to space. (The company plans to start accepting passengers next year.)

Sergey Brin appears to be a fan of all manner of flying objects, including spaceships.

Brin, the Google cofounder worth $108 billion, has a passion for unusual aircraft. For the past four years, Brin has been working on a secretive airship company known as LTA Research and Exploration — "LTA" being short for "lighter than air." The company got its start inside NASA's Ames Research Center and is working to bring its vision of zero-emission aircrafts to life. 

While the goal of Brin's airships is to deliver humanitarian aid, the ship — similar to a Zeppelin or blimp — is also luxuriously appointed so it could serve as an "intercontinental air yacht" for Brin's friends and family. 

But it seems Brin is hoping to go higher than even a blimp can take him. In 2008, Brin invested $5 million in space tourism company Space Adventures. According to Forbes, the investment was also a deposit for a future spaceflight.

The company has completed several spaceflights with private citizens including Microsoft billionaire Charles Simonyi and Cirque Du Soleil founder Guy Laliberté, but it's unclear if and when Brin will embark on a trip of his own. 

Paul Allen had a luxury submarine and a passion for underwater exploration.

Before Allen's death in 2018 from non-Hodgkin lymphoma, he was the owner of a fleet of fabulous megayachts. But aboard those luxury yachts was something more exotic: submarines and underwater vehicles capable of diving hundreds of feet into the depths of the ocean. 

"It turns out if you go 1,000 feet down in the ocean, it's really dark, and the animals are really strange,"Allen told Geekwire in 2011. "But if you put on some Pink Floyd, it's fantastic."

The details of Allen's yachts and submarine were something of a secret, with Fred Rodie, one of Allen's boatbuilders, telling the Seattle Times in 2007 that he's "not really supposed to talk about the sub, but it's a fancy one, a mighty nice piece of work." 

Allen's submarine, named Pagoo, was 40 feet long, cost $12 million to build, fit eight passengers and two crew members, and was capable of diving for up to eight hours, according to the Seattle Times and Allen's website. The best part? It was actually yellow.

Allen was passionate about underwater exploration and used his fleet of yachts, subs, and underwater vehicles to help find long-lost artifacts, including the wreckage of multiple World War I and II battleships. He was also present for director James Cameron's 2012 dive to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, according to Geekwire.

And, like many of his peers, Allen had space ambitions of his own. In 2011, he launched Stratolaunch Systems with the goal of building the world's largest airplane in order to launch satellites and send humans to space. 

Mark Zuckerberg prefers sports like electric surfing and bow-hunting.

While Mark Zuckerberg's pursuits are more Earth-bound than some of his fellow billionaires, he has plenty of extreme pastimes of his own. 

The Facebook CEO is a fan (and talented user of) the Lift Foils efoil, an electric surfboard that retails for $12,000. He's been spotted aboard the unusual surfboard multiple times near his property on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, and has posted videos of himself successfully navigating choppy waters. 

Zuckerberg's interests appear to extend to other outdoor pursuits: He recently posted videos of himself using a bow and arrows and throwing spears in what appeared to be hunting practice, and he once served Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey a goat he had killed as part of a 2011 challenge to only eat animals he killed himself. 

Jack Dorsey meditates for hours each day and only eats dinner.

For Dorsey, a love of the extreme is much more inward focused. Rather than kitesurf or explore outer space, Dorsey fasts and participates in silent meditations. 

In 2018, Dorsey spent his birthday in Myanmar doing a 10-day silent vipassana meditation. He described the experience on Twitter as "extremely painful": He meditated from 4 a.m. to 9 p.m. each day; wasn't allowed to eat dinner, read, listen to music, or make eye contact with others; and ended up with 117 mosquito bites in a single night. 

Since then, Dorsey has said he tries to meditate for two hours each day and eats only seven meals in a week— only dinner. 

Larry Ellison has spent millions on yacht-racing and even founded his own racing league.

While Ellison has been passionate about sailing since his early 20s, he didn't get serious about the sport until the 1990s, when he bought a 78-foot racing sailboat he called Sayonara. He started competing in races, winning world championships, once almost dying in a storm on Sydney Harbour.

He later began competing in the America's Cup, an annual yacht race that takes place every three or four years. In 2010, Ellison and his crew won the race, with the then-65-year-old billionaire onboard.

Ellison has now spent hundreds of millions of dollars on his racing pursuits, won a second victory at the America's Cup in 2013, and launched his own sailing league that was most recently valued at $200 million.