A look inside Nicole Shanahan’s journey to become RFK Jr.’s running mate. to become… from a brutal childhood to a billionaire love triangle: the daughter of a welfare-employed Chinese immigrant mother turned millionaire lawyer and California cover girl

Robert F. Kennedy’s new running mate, 38-year-old Nicole Shanahan, has the ultimate American rags-to-riches story.

The lawyer, tech entrepreneur, philanthropist and mother of one grew up on welfare to a Chinese immigrant mother and father who was diagnosed with bipolar schizophrenia.

She persevered through her tumultuous upbringing to earn her law degree, start a multi-million dollar company in her twenties, create a foundation and now qualify for the second most powerful job in the world.

But before she switched to politics, Shanahan was known for her role in an alleged love triangle involving two of the richest men in the world: ex-husband and Google co-founder Sergey Brin, number 10 in the rankings. Bloomberg Billionaires Indexand Elon Musk, who is currently at number 3.

She has since moved on with her partner Jacob Strumwasser, to whom she dedicated a “love ceremony” last summer, posing in a giant floral dress. for a People Magazine distribution.

Shanahan’s grandfather was a landlord in Macoa and her grandmother was a factory worker in China “and because of the communist revolution they encountered,” she explained when she returned to her undergraduate alma mater, the Tacoma, Washington-based University of Puget Sound, in 2021. .

Her mother, she said, had to overcome a father who believed that a “son was more valuable than a daughter.”

“To the extent that he pushed my grandmother to keep having children until she had a son,” Shanahan said. ‘She never did that. She had five daughters.’

But in a sense, her grandfather raised her mother as a ‘son’.

She said her mother was a housekeeper before she became an accountant and did not reach the United States until she was 30.

Two years later Shanahan was born.

“My father wasn’t doing well,” she said. We had a very low income, we were on benefits.’

“I had a very difficult childhood with a lot of sadness, fear and instability,” she said People magazine from last year. ‘Sometimes there was violence.’

Shanahan said she was able to afford the University of Puget Sound through a UPS scholarship.

“I actually hadn’t even visited campus before my move-in date because we didn’t have money to visit colleges,” she recalls.

The future lawyer studied Asian studies, economics and Mandarin Chinese and took some science classes, “which I actually wasn’t very good at,” she said during the college appearance. “But you made me take those classes anyway.”

She graduated in 2007 and headed to Switzerland, where she received a certificate in WTO studies, and to Singapore for a law student exchange while she sought her JD from Santa Clara University. She worked as a paralegal for a while.

She said of her grandfather, “He was so proud. He didn’t really understand why I was going to study law, but he really liked the idea.’

She started her business, ClearAccessIP, while I was still in law school.

In a 2015 interview with MogulShanahan said the idea for ClearAccessIP was “hypothetical” and that she put it into practice after working at several law firms and then a licensing company.

“The more time I spent with patent data, the more I realized the value of aggregating it and creating standard analysis processes around the patented technology,” she said.

Shanahan added, “I’ve always been attracted to the concept that you can own an idea, and that ideas can lead to people coming together to build something, and that something can potentially change the course of human history. ‘

In the same interview, she revealed that the three people from history she would like to meet were fashion designer Coco Chanel, Ayn Rand – a favorite writer of libertarians – and Alan Turing, whose Turing Test was used on machines to see if they could exhibit intelligent behavior.

And in the light-hearted Q&A she talked about her funniest and most romantic dates.

She married Bay Area investor Jeremy Asher Kranz in 2013, but the couple divorced in 2015.

That was the same year that the very active Shanahan — whose hobbies include paddleboarding, snowboarding, swimming, running and yoga — met Brin at a yoga festival in Lake Tahoe.

Both had ties to Stanford, as Shanahan became a Stanford CodeX fellow at the prestigious Stanford Center for Legal Informatics in 2014.

“We fell in love with Stanford while wandering around campus and talking about quantum physics,” she told People in 2023. “He showed me the areas he frequented when he was there as a graduate student – ​​​​and where he created Google with Larry Pagina!”

‘I was living in a fairy tale. It was magical. It seemed like we could really solve a lot of the world’s problems with technology then,” she said.

Brin and Shanahan quietly married in 2018 and kept their marriage quiet until 2019, after the birth of their daughter Echo.

Since Echo’s birth, Shanahan has been outspoken about her fertility problems, although she in turn has been critical of the IVF option, saying it was being “irresponsibly marketed.”

She said the money should go towards the goal of increasing fertility for women into their 50s – and has since spent millions on that cause.

‘And I’ve tried to imagine where we would be as a field if all the money invested in IVF and all the money invested in marketing IVF and all the government money invested in subsidizing IVF “If just 10 percent of that went to reproductive longevity, research and basic research, that’s where we would be today,” she says. said in a 2021 interview.

In 2018, Shanahan invested $6 million to launch the Buck Institute’s Center for Female Reproductive Longevity and Equality.

A year later, she launched the Bia-Echo Foundation, which focuses on three causes: reproductive longevity and equality, criminal justice reform and the environment, and put another $7.4 million into the Buck Institute center.

In 2020, she sold ClearAccessIP to donate her time to the Bia-Echo Foundation.

In the 2023 People interview, she talked about how she never got used to being among the mega-rich.

“Living as the wife of a billionaire, I wasn’t the best version of myself,” she mused. “I felt conflicted every day, like I didn’t have access to the thing that made me who I am.”

“I couldn’t get access to that five-year-old girl who had to figure out how to turn a 30-year-old baseball glove into something I could take to softball with,” she said. “It was the girl who just had endless optimism and tenacity and that fight – because I’m a fighter – and I didn’t know how to shift gears. I’ve tried for years. I looked around for examples of how I could adapt to this new lifestyle.’

The couple separated in 2021, with Brin filing for divorce in June 2022 and becoming an object of public fascination in July 2022.

The Wall Street Journal reports this that Shanahan and Musk had a brief affair that led to Brin filing for divorce earlier that year and the two billionaires ending their longtime friendship.

Both Shanahan and Musk have vehemently denied ever being romantic, while the Wall Street Journal stands by the report.

Shanahan told People that she and Musk had a conversation about autism after Echo was diagnosed as being on the spectrum, and that she was “internationally shamed for being an imposter.”

“Did Elon and I have sex, like it was a moment of passion, and then it was over? No,’ she said. ‘Did we have a romantic relationship? No. We weren’t having an affair.’

It’s unclear exactly how much Shanahan took away from the split, as the couple reportedly owned a massive Malibu estate — previously owned by singer Pink — a penthouse in Manhattan, multiple properties in Silicon Valley. and a 240-foot superyacht called Dragonfly.

Most recently, she was able to donate more than $4 million to the Kennedy-focused super PAC American Values ​​2024 to help fund the independent candidate’s Super Bowl ad.

In the midst of her divorce from Brin and as Google search results with Shanahan’s name continued to show her romantically linked to Musk, the Bay Area attorney attended Burning Man and met her current partner, Strumwasser, through a friend.

“It seems like we were living parallel surfing lives, and then we met at Burning Man, the driest place on earth, and talked about how much we missed surfing,” she told People in July. ‘I feel really happy, he’s beautiful.’

In May, they held a “love ceremony” instead of a traditional wedding.

‘There is a beach that both he and I have a strong bond with, where we had surfed independently many times before we met and then surfed together on an early date,” she said. “We fell in love with surfing there and had a love blessing ceremony with the water we collected on that beach.”

They then went to her property in Southern California.

“It was spontaneous with some friends,” she told People. “We didn’t know who was going to end up there, but we had a handful of friends and we had a friend who believes in the magic of water and who brought us a water blessing. It was beautiful.’