Burning Man, mushroom parties, and jamming with math teachers: Inside Google cofounder Sergey Brin's whirlwind social calendar

In late August this year, Sergey Brin headed to Burning Man.

The billionaire Google cofounder is no stranger to the hedonistic festival — he's attended for years — but 2022's gathering was the first official "Burn" since the pandemic upended the world.

The 49-year-old tech titan traveled to the festival in style, island-hopping across the Pacific Ocean in a modified seaplane. Once he got to the "playa" — the roughly 7-square-mile patch of desert in northwestern Nevada where Burning Man takes place — Brin, topless and festooned with a space-age, bandolier-style necklace, partied alongside the other 80,000 festivalgoers. 

But the eight-day celebration in the sand isn't the only psychedelic gathering that Brin has attended over the past year, Insider found in an investigation into Brin and fellow cofounder Larry Page's lives since stepping back from Google's parent company, Alphabet, in 2019. 

Despite Brin's divorce from the lawyer and philanthropist Nicole Shanahan, which became tabloid fodder after lurid (and disputed) allegations surfaced that Shanahan had a secret tryst with Brin's fellow billionaire and onetime confidant Elon Musk, he still made time for a whirlwind of social engagements, parties, and impromptu concerts. A spokesperson for Brin declined to comment on the record.

Brin spent his Thanksgiving holiday in 2021 with a member of the Russian punk band Pussy Riot, who shared on Instagram a since-deleted video of Brin hula-hooping. And according to people in attendance, he swung by a Burning Man-themed event earlier this year at Wilbur Hot Springs, an exclusive resort in Northern California owned by a coterie of space entrepreneurs. Brin has been spotted more than once at house parties at NeoGenesis, a coliving space for entrepreneurs in the Bay Area.

Over the summer, in the weeks after the Musk allegations emerged in The Wall Street Journal, Brin was photographed at dinner with the illusionist David Blaine and a "mystery blonde woman," The Daily Mail reported. He found himself onstage with a middle-aged math teacher's rock band in New York City. (It's unclear how this surreal jam session came about.) Earlier in the year, he hobnobbed with the Hollywood elite at Vanity Fair's exclusive Oscars party in Los Angeles.

He also stopped by a launch party in July celebrating the mushroom startup Shroomboom in the Topanga hills just north of Los Angeles, where a DJ duo created experimental electronic music by wiring up fungi to a sound system and guests openly consumed psychedelic mushrooms. As for the bigger psychedelic party, when Burning Man reopened in August after its pandemic hiatus, Brin stayed at First Camp, a VIP community frequented by festival organizers and their friends. 

But for all the partying, boats, and personal turbulence, associates insist Brin still has time for more industrious pursuits. The Wall Street Journal this summer reported that the former Ph.D. candidate was spending some time writing a physics textbook. (It's not clear what its focus will be.) He is fascinated by climate technology, including carbon-trading networks, and has a keen interest in psychedelics, peers say. He also has time for athletic pursuits: Brin once dedicated a year to learning all the sports in the decathlon, from the shot put to hurdles. And he was once a regular at the Mavericks surf contest in Half Moon Bay near San Francisco, where he would sometimes hitch a ride in a rescue boat. In his remaining downtime, Brin enjoys juggling.

"If he could live like a normal guy, I think he would prefer to do that," a former colleague told Insider. "He's a tech nerd at heart and probably wickedly smart and genius. You mix that with some good luck and timing, you end up with Sergey Brin."

Read Insider's full investigation into Larry Page and Sergey Brin's private empires»

Hugh Langley is a correspondent at Insider covering Alphabet and Google.

Rob Price is a correspondent at Insider, writing features and investigations about the technology industry.