Google’s Sergey Brin and “MAGA Girlfriend” Gerelyn Soto Are Part of Silicon Valley’s Move to the Right

Gerelyn Soto walks into the dimly lit club chewing gum and wearing a leather jacket, ready for a showdown. Cameras follow her as she gets a drink and makes her way to the dance floor, where a woman is standing wearing a baby blue dress. It’s 2016, and the scene is being filmed for an episode of Vanderpump Rules, a millennial-friendly reality TV show that follows a group of waiters and bartenders working at restaurants across West Hollywood.

Raquel, in the blue, introduces herself. “I’ve heard that you’re obsessed with my boyfriend,” she says, her face wide. “Girl, you know that that’s not true,” says Soto, who goes by GG. “You know he cheated on you.” The boyfriend, a British DJ named James Kennedy, who had been playing a clunky set in the background, weaves over to the women, sweaty and frazzled. He starts insulting Soto, getting up close to her face, insisting they were never involved. Soto, looking irritated, reaches out and slaps him upside the head. It all feels completely staged. “Dude, she was swinging!” a woman watching nearby excitedly tells her friend.

By September 2025, Soto was on a much bigger stage. Inside the White House, nearly a year into Donald Trump’s second term, she joined a group of Silicon Valley leaders for a dinner hosted by Trump and his wife, Melania. Now a wellness influencer and a fervent MAGA supporter, she was there with her boyfriend, Sergey Brin, the billionaire cofounder of Google, who was seated next to her. Other big tech names were there—Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Apple CEO Tim Cook—all looking awkward as they took turns complimenting Trump. Brin, by contrast, seemed to enjoy the attention, turning in his seat to smile at the press photographers behind him, a person who was there recounts to me. A camera snapped as Soto reached over to scratch the back of Brin’s head; her fingers sparkled with rings. Trump, sitting across from them, called Soto Brin’s “really wonderful MAGA girlfriend.”

Brin’s appearance at the dinner surprised some who knew him. In the past he was not particularly political, former colleagues tell me, but he had supported Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign and donated to the Democratic National Committee. In 2017, he joined protesters at San Francisco International Airport to rally against Trump’s executive order that barred people from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the US. For Brin, it was a personal affront. His family had moved to the US in the 1970s as refugees from the Soviet Union, fleeing antisemitism and eventually settling in Maryland. When Trump was first elected, Brin told employees at Google, “As an immigrant and a refugee, I certainly find this election deeply offensive.”

When Trump was elected for a second time, promising to carry out the largest deportation program in American history, Brin did a 180. He has since forged close ties with the Trump administration and become more politically active—particularly in California, where he has backed conservative candidates including former reality TV star Spencer Pratt, who campaigned for Los Angeles mayor with a promise to crack down on homelessness; and Steve Hilton, a British former Fox News host who is running for California governor with Trump’s endorsement. Hilton opposes California’s proposed “billionaire tax,” a Democrat-led plan that Brin and other Silicon Valley leaders have been fighting to kill.

Over a video call from Los Angeles, Hilton tells me about conversations he’s had with Brin, 53, and Soto, 33, and how they bonded over the belief that California needs economic change. (The New York Times first reported that the couple hosted Hilton for a meal earlier this year at their California home.) They have since exchanged some text messages, he says, and have loose plans to get together again. Of Soto, Hilton says: “We just had a great connection. And she had the same attitude of, We love California, this is crazy what’s happening.” Through spokespeople, Brin and Soto both declined interview requests for this story.

The couple are part of a wider pattern of previously left-leaning public figures embracing conservative politics. Many, like Soto, are activated by what they see as the creep of “wokeness” and the alleged silencing of conservative voices. Meanwhile tech leaders like Brin stand to gain from having a pro-business, anti-regulation president in power. Google, like Meta, OpenAI, and other tech companies, has been spending billions of dollars developing and deploying artificial intelligence technology. After going into retirement just before COVID hit, Brin later decided to return to the office to work on what became Google’s Gemini.

Niki Christoff, a former Google executive who worked with Brin, tells me, “It’s hard for me to reconcile someone whose personal history is of coming to the United States as a refugee, who went to a state school in Maryland, supporting an administration that is so anti-immigrant.”

Yet Soto has rejected suggestions that she’s responsible for Brin’s shift to the right, saying he had grown disillusioned with the Democrats. “If he were some raging lib, he wouldn’t be with me, and I wouldn’t be with him,” she said in an interview with The Free Press in May. “He has a mind of his own. If I could control him, I’d be married with a baby right now.”

Before meeting Brin, Soto had gone through a political transformation of her own.

In 2016, she wanted Hillary Clinton to win. Soto was excited that a woman was running for president, and thought that Trump, then a cartoonish New York businessman mostly known for his reality TV show The Apprentice, didn’t have enough political experience for the job, a friend of hers from that time tells me. (Like many people I spoke to for this story, the friend did not want to be named.) They were both horrified by what they saw as Trump’s misogynistic treatment of women.

Soto’s drift from the Democrats solidified during the pandemic, following what she described online as the “George Floyd riots,” the Democratic Party’s “aggressive and authoritarian response to COVID,” and the realization she had been “manipulated and lied to by the mainstream media about Donald Trump.”

Like Trump, Soto gravitated toward celebrity. In 2015, she got a job working as an intern and then as a personal assistant at Kris Jenner’s communications firm. In late 2017, she was hired as an assistant to Corinne Olympios, a popular reality star who had become known as the villain on the 21st season of The Bachelor. According to Olympios, Soto was “very intense” and was “outspoken” about her views. The relationship quickly soured. Olympios tells me she cut ties with Soto after only a few months, following an incident in Aspen, which Olympios declined to elaborate on.

After leaving LA for San Francisco in 2018, Soto got a health-coach certification from an online training provider called the ​​Institute for Integrative Nutrition; she started posting wellness content online and launched a business offering health advice. In 2022, she attended a retreat in Costa Rica called “La Luna,” which was designed to help women find energetic balance. When I spoke to someone who was also there, she told me the process involved unpacking how society has stripped women of their “feminine energy” and encouraged them to adopt “masculine energy,” which she says meant things like prioritizing their careers and delaying motherhood.

In March 2024, Brin was fresh off his second divorce when he was photographed with Soto at the Vanity Fair Oscar Party in Beverly Hills. The pair had started dating in 2023 after meeting at a mutual friend’s house in San Francisco. Brin’s first wife, Anne Wojcicki, the cofounder of genetics testing company 23andMe, was also at the Vanity Fair event, and posed with the couple on the red carpet. Brin had met Wojcicki in the early days of Google, when he and his cofounder, Larry Page, rented a garage belonging to Wojcicki’s sister to use as office space. After the couple divorced in 2015, Brin married Nicole Shanahan, a lawyer, and they had a daughter together. But the marriage was short lived. Shanahan allegedly had a brief affair with Elon Musk, a claim Shanahan and Musk both publicly denied, and she and Brin separated in 2021 after about three years of marriage. (Shanahan and Wojcicki did not respond to requests for comment.)

When Trump was first elected, Brin told employees at Google, “As an immigrant and a refugee, I certainly find this election deeply offensive.”

Steve Granitz

In the years that followed, Shanahan transformed her public image, emerging as a vocal supporter and wealthy booster for the “Make America Healthy Again” movement. She donated millions of dollars to the presidential campaign of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a critic of vaccines, and joined his ticket as his vice presidential running mate.

Soto is also a supporter of MAHA, a movement that has found currency with wellness influencers whose views overlap on issues around food, motherhood, and pharmaceuticals. “I support it because I feel like women are especially gaslit about their health,” Soto told The Free Press. On TikTok, Instagram, and X, Soto’s content mixes MAGA politics with wellness tips and photos of home gyms, lux vacations, and parties. She advocates for eating meat to stave off depression, taking magnesium over getting therapy, and ridding your home of things like scented candles and sunscreen, which, she claims, without evidence, cause cancer. It’s unclear who her posts are geared toward: She has low follower counts, by influencer standards, and recently made her Instagram and X pages private.

Last May, Soto attended an event at the White House to mark the release of the MAHA Commission report about the state of US health. The room was high energy, mostly filled with influencers who spend their days talking online about pesticides and processed foods—the kinds of people who have traditionally felt shut out of mainstream health-policy conversations, a person who was there explains to me. The attendees clamored to take selfies and generate content. Soto later shared photos from the event on social media, some showing her standing alongside billionaire venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson and his wife, Genevieve. Soto had spent election night with the couple—both women donned matching MAHA T-shirts for the occasion.

While Brin makes few public comments about politics, Soto is overt, seeming to relish in shock factor. “I remember knowing very quickly from my conversation that she was very, very keen on the president,” a person who spoke with her at a party last year tells me. She has defended the Department of Homeland Security’s immigration crackdown in Minnesota, criticised Islam, warned about the dangers of “trans ideology,” and the “disease” of Liberalism. In Trumpian style, she routinely attacks people she doesn’t agree with, branding California governor Gavin Newsom a “piece of shit” and describing Democratic gubernatorial hopeful Matt Mahan as having the “personality of a wooden spoon.” (Mahan, seizing on the moment, responded publicly that wooden spoons are “tough, trusted, and built to handle the heat.”)

Silicon Valley leaders’ rightward shift under Trump is now well-documented, but, according to one researcher who has studied it, also widely misunderstood.

Greg Ferenstein, head of Frederick Research, tells me he recently conducted a study with researchers at Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley, to gauge how tech founders are thinking about political issues, following up on research published in 2017. Ferenstein says the recent survey, which involved polling hundreds of tech founders and is still awaiting peer review, found that a majority still identified as Democrats and the number that considered themselves “strong Republicans” had not moved much. But Ferenstein says they have grown more conservative in certain areas, particularly on racial issues. They also favored developing AI with limited regulation, which is in line with Trump’s approach.

Still, the image of Silicon Valley CEOs attending an opulent dinner with a president they once condemned was a stunning shift, even for Trump. According to Regime Change, a book by New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, the president has privately ridiculed tech titans for their fawning overtures, which Elon Musk reportedly described as “first-class grovelling.” (Musk himself spent more than $250 million to get Trump elected.)

Before meeting Brin, Soto had gone through a political transformation of her own.

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Brin’s political turn also marks a shift from the early days of Google, when he took little interest in the company’s political strategy, former colleagues tell me. Meanwhile, after Trump was elected and Brin started spending time in Washington and at Mar-a-Lago, staff inside Google were told not to talk about the Trump administration, either publicly or among themselves, a former manager tells me. The company, which did not comment for this story, has had internal guidelines in place since 2019 that discourage employees from debating politics.

Brin’s biggest political push is in California, where he has mobilized a campaign to fight against a ballot measure that would impose a onetime 5% tax on people with a net worth over $1 billion. Brin—who, shortly after the measure was proposed, reportedly moved much of his business interests out of the state and bought a lakeside mansion in Nevada—has donated $102 million to Building a Better California, an organization backing two competing ballot measures that would effectively cancel out the wealth-tax proposal.

It’s all heading toward a showdown in November, following a contentious primary round in the governor’s race. Brin initially donated to the campaign of Mahan, a centrist Democrat who was also against the tax, before he got behind Hilton, a Republican whom Soto had encouraged people in her network to vote for.

Chris Larsen, the billionaire cofounder of crypto company Ripple, has also donated money to Hilton, whom he met with in person and spoke to a couple of times over Zoom, according to Hilton. But Hilton insists that most of the tech community got behind Mahan, and “that’s definitely not something that’s just flipped over to me.” He is now facing off against Democrat Xavier Becerra.

When I spoke to Katie Harbath, the founder of the technology policy firm Anchor Change and a former Facebook policy executive, about the changing politics of Silicon Valley, she said the jury was still out about what tech leaders will do if Republicans lose power in the midterms—or in the 2028 presidential election. They are usually quick to move on to the next thing when projects don’t work out, she adds.

“If the Dems take over the House and they start dragging all these guys in front of hearings about how close they are to Trump,” she says, “I think a big question is, does that cause any of them to go back into their bunkers and not do this as much?”