The generous explanation for Schmidt's statement is that he's revolutionized his thinking since 2005, when he blacklisted CNET for publishing info about him gleaned from Google searches, including salary, neighborhood, hobbies and political donations. In that case, the married CEO must not mind all the coverage of his various reputed girlfriends; it's odd he doesn't clarify what's going on with the widely-rumored extramarital dalliances, though.

Schmidt's philosophy is clear with Bartiromo in the clip below: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." The philosophy that secrets are useful mainly to indecent people is awfully convenient for Schmidt as the CEO of a company whose value proposition revolves around info-hoarding. Convenient, that is, as long as people are smart enough not to apply the "secrets suck" philosophy to their Google passwords , credit card numbers and various other secrets they need to put money in Google's pockets.

It's enough to make one pine for the more innocent Google bursting forth in the c. 1999 group picture at the top of this post, also gleaned from CNBC's special. The hair might have been sillier — dig co-founder Sergey Brin and VP Marissa Mayers' cuts, top center — but no one was yet audacious enough to argue against the very idea of a secret.

The only non internet person on Couric's list, in fact, is FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski. The other people who control the media, according to the CBS Evening News anchor, are all Web heads:

• Google's Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
  
• Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington.
  
• The founders of the women's blogging network BlogHer: Jory Des Jardins, Elisa Camahort Page and Lisa Stone. This is a big stretch but we're assuming Couric is trying to imagine the less sexist world she'd like to live in and lend some buzz to a feminist cause. Fair enough.
  
• Craig Newmark, Craigslist founder.
  
• Twitter co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone.
  
• Facebook CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg.

Couric is obviously just trying to butter up people who might be able to help her ditch the old fuddy-duddies at CBS News and expand her promising sideline in lifecasting. Which is, frankly, brilliant. We know some other people who might be able to help you Katie, call us.

Oh, and the Jewish thing? Couric is no anti-Semite, but we couldn't help but notice that her list of people who supposedly control the media does contain a majority of people of Jewish descent: Brin, Page, Newmark, Zuckerberg, Genachowski and Camahort Page.

Of course, the pace of change in Silicon Valley has a way of leveling these old-world distinctions. Page's family was non-practicing; Zuckerberg has gone atheist and Camahort Page is "a total non-religious person."

[via Bay Newser via NBC Bay Area]

The genetics-testing startup, co-founded by Anne Wojcicki, the wife of a Google co-founder, recently confirmed a fresh layoff round to TechCrunch. A source close to the company tells us close to 18 staff were let go in that round. "They're hemorrhaging cash with no real business plan," said the tipster.

A cash bleed would help explain some other recent developments: co-founder Linda Avery left in September, saying she wanted to focus on Alzheimer's research, according to emails first published by Kara Swisher at All Thing D. And in June, 23andMe laid off close to 10 employees, according to both our current and prior tipsters. Layoff rounds of about 10 and 18 workers are quite significant for a startup that once had an estimated mere 30 on staff.

In another, way, though, the layoffs seem odd: Google just put $2.6 million into the company this past June as part of a $24 million financing round, and Wojcicki's husband Sergey Brin invested another $10 million prior to that. Wojcicki's company even started leasing space from Google. So why would the company be allowed to crater now?

We've been trying to get answers from 23andMe's publicists since last week and have yet to hear back. But we can guess at some possible reasons: To attract well-heeled customers for its $400 tests, the company has been shelling out to fly a zeppelin all over Silicon Valley, which can't be cheap (good thing for Google that the search giant may well own the zeppelin company, helping it recoup some of its investment). Come to think of it, genetic tests can't be cheap either, and the price must seem especially high when customers learn they are buying "recreational genomics" rather than proper medical tests.

Recreational though they may be, 23andMe's tests can at least give clues about a person's medical future. For corporations, they are useless. Perhaps someone can come up with a genetic test for founders that will help predict startup success. We can think of 28 or so recently-fired people who'd be keenly interested in signing up.

(Pic: Wojcicki, by Esther Dyson)

Brin's mother-in-law Esther Wojcicki was among the speakers at the Breakthough Learning forum at Google last week co-sponsored the producers of Sesame Street, by the MacArthur Foundation and by Common Sense Media. She joined such fellow speakers as the chancellor of New York City schools, Apple's director of education and a Stanford education professor. If that weren't enough, Brin publicly declared Wojcicki, a Palo Alto High School English and Journalism teacher, to be under-appreciated, telling the LA Times,

"It's really a miserable job," he said. "They're not really paid a living wage."

Well, Palo Alto teachers make $51,000 to $104,000 per year, which in most other parts of the country would be considered a pretty decent salary. And then there are the fringe benefits, like board seats, consulting gigs and venture investments, that come from being married into Brin's inner circle. But Wojcicki was a 2002 teacher of the year for all of California, and got her student journalists at 2009 research award from the MacArthur Foundation. Surely there should be some kind of bonus for that, in the Palo Alto school district. People need incentives, after all, right?

(Wojcicki pic via Google)

In response to a question about "what keeps you up at night" at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco, Brin talked about what "keeps me excited at night." Oh, Sergey, you naughty boy. "Primarily hardware." Heh, do tell! "A processor with eight cores... two terabyte hard drive... micro SD cards."

Sigh. A computer geek at all hours, then. Not knowing about batting averages is one thing, even if Brin did immigrate from Russia at the young age of six. But laying awake at night, thinking about computer chips and Moore's Law? That's hard core nerdery, right there. And if that's what it takes to achieve a multi-billion-dollar personal net worth and the creation of a hugely powerful tech company, we know plenty of people who would give up their normalcy in a heartbeat.

Above, find a compilation of geeky-freaky Brin moments, culled from conference footage and this interview his wife gave, in which she mentions that coffee helps prevent Parkinson's, which Brin is genetically at risk for. It's especially palatable with cream and sugar, Sergey.

Speaking to reporters today in New York, founder Sergey Brin and CEO Eric Schmidt (pictured) said people shouldn't come to the company to get rich, and shouldn't expect fancy food, Peter Kafka at All Things D reports.

Brin:

There was a period of time where the [Google] culture, as it were, was misinterpreted... When there were a few of us working in the garage... occasionally [cofounder] Larry [Page] would Rollerblade in with a few sandwiches for food. And that grew up into everybody's expectation: "Oh, they should have all the gourmet food they want, at any time." ...We decided to... significantly cut down all the snacks that had been available.

Schmidt:

Google pays very well. Google is clearly a growth company... We don't want them to come to Google for those reasons. We want them to come to Google to change the world...



....The tightening that [CFO] Patrick [Pichette] in particular did, who I think is the current Google hero, really did change the culture in a much more pragmatic way: "We're happy to work here. We're happy to be employed. We love what we're doing. Our friends, you know, have been laid off."

So, to summarize, a CEO who is a multibillionaire due to his Google stock says that you shouldn't come to the company to get rich, but to change the world. And the co-founder who has got Google investing in and renting space to his wife's company and hiring his mother in law as a consultant says Google shouldn't breed a culture of entitlement. OK.

But that puts to lie Google's old line, which was that it made crucial productivity gains by keeping programmers in the office longer with perks like free haircuts, a climbing wall, free internet-enabled buses, and, yes, free gourmet food. Here's what Brin and co-founder Larry Page wrote in an open letter to investors ahead of Google's 2004 IPO:

We provide many unusual benefits for our employees, including meals free of charge, doctors and washing machines. We are careful to consider the long term advantages to the company of these benefits. Expect us to add benefits rather than pare them down over time. We believe it is easy to be penny wise and pound foolish with respect to benefits that can save employees considerable time and improve their health and productivity.

Brin also defended the perks in a 2001 New York Times article, saying that, compared to routine corporate costs like marketing campaigns, ''these things cost nothing." Apparently "nothing" really adds up.

Speaking to reporters this very minute, CEO Eric Schmidt and co-founder Sergey Brin said the Mountain View, California company is through with its recent belt-tightening, which included layoffs and cutbacks in the company's famously posh perquisites. "We're increasing our hiring rate and investment rate in an anticipation of a recovery," Schmidt said, according to Peter Kafka of All Things D, who has been liveblogging Schmidt's meeting with the press.

Pressed further, Schmidt, net worth $5.5 billion, added:

From our perspective, the low point was somewhere in the spring. Which is why I said worst was behind us in May, June. Noticed recovery "Juneish". The conventional wisdom is that US recessions are 18-24 months. Bernanke sees a recovery too, which we agree with.

Added Brin ($15 billion), "And we're good indicator for consumer spending, and you can see for yourself by looking at Google Trends."

Meanwhile, national unemployment stands at 9.8 percent and Alan Greenspan, an actual economist and former Federal Reserve Board chair, predicts the economy will just get worse and then stagnate for a good long while. But he cited absolutely zero Google statistics for his prediction, nor does he get free food and laundry and transportation and snacks and internet access and literally actual trips to Disneyland provided for him free at work, so can you really trust it?

In 2005, not long after News Corp. bought MySpace, when it still seemed like a brilliant purchase... I congratulated him on the acquisition. "Now," he said, "we're in the stalking business."

Later in his Vanity Fair column, Wolff recounts how Murdoch asked the founders of Google "Why don't you read newspapers?", gave "a walleyed stare" during all conversations about Web news and tried to beat Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg to death with his cane.

Kidding; even after buying MySpace, Murdoch was over the moon for Zuckerberg. He invited the founder to speak at a News Corp. executive retreat, huddled with him throughout dinner — sparking obvious jealousy in MySpace co-founder Chris DeWolfe — and soon declared people were "all going to Facebook at the moment" rather than MySpace. All this according to Julia Angwin's Stealing MySpace.

The point is, Rupert Murdoch has always kind of hated on MySpace, cruelly, in public.

(Pic: Murdoch and MySpace CEO DeWolfe at the opening of MySpace's San Francisco office in Oct. 2007. Getty Images.)

Brin just contributed $500,000 of his personal wealth to the Creative Commons, a nonprofit to encourage the sharing of copyrighted works. Creative Commons, in turn, is chaired by Esther Wojcicki, notes Peter Kafka of All Things D, and Wojcicki, a Palo Alto high school teacher, is the mother of Brin's wife, Anne Wojcicki. Brin's company previously hired his mother-in-law as an educational consultant; she in turn has promoted in her Huffington Post column both Google Docs and an airship company Google appears to be invested in. Anne Wojcicki, of course, started 23andMe, a genetics-testing company that counts Google as a landlord and repeat investor.

Which is all by way of saying, we think Brin very much has earned the drumstick at Thanksgiving this year.

23andMe, you'll recall, is the genetics-testing company founded by Anne Wojciki (left), wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin. Google is an investor in 23andMe and leases the company office space.

A tipster recently spotted a 23AndMe "blimp" flying around Cupertino and the rest of Silicon Valley. Some digging revealed the "blimp" is, in fact, a zeppelin, provided by a company called Airship Ventures.

Airship Ventures, in turn, is funded by Google, according to some strong evidence we wrote about previously. It's also funded by "futurist" Esther Dyson. Dyson, like Google, also invests in 23AndMe.

Dyson, as it turned out, is also funded by Google; "I have fed at its trough many times," she once wrote, citing speaking gigs and advisory board slots. She has, in turn, been something of an advocate, declaring publicly that Google actively fights evil and should be allowed to regulate itself (she disclosed her ties to the company when saying this).

So, here are some of the interlocking money flows:

• Google has given money to its founder's wife's firm 23AndMe, which in turn has given money (or other consideration) to Airship Ventures, owned by Google itself (it would appear) and by Google vendor and public Google advocate Esther Dyson.
• Google has given money and/or co-invested with "futurist" Dyson, who has in turn given money to 23AndMe, a Google investment co-founded by it's own co-founder's wife.
• 23AndMe gives money to Google, for office space, while Google gives money to 23AndMe as an investment; 23AndMe then hires Airship Ventures, whose profits then go to Google as an (apparent) owner, and to Google defender Dyson as another owner.
  
• Dyson's investment 23AndMe hired Airship Ventures, another Dyson investment.

There are also some softer, stranger relationships:

• Esther Wojcicki (left), mother-in-law to Google co-founder Sergey Brin and mother to 23AndMe founder Anne Wojcicki, has promoted both Airship Ventures and Google Docs in the Huffington Post. She once worked for Google as an educational consultant.
• NASA allows Airship Ventures to dock at Moffet Field, saying its craft will be used for scientific investigations. It also allows Google's founders to park their party jets there, citing similar reasons.

It's hard to doubt this back-scratching, built as it is on cashflow originating at Google, benefits the search giant's friends; the real question is whether it does any good for shareholders.

(Second blimp pic by John Murphy on Facebook, submitted as part of a 23AndMe Facebook contest. Esther Dyson pic by Steve Jurvetson.)

According to an SEC filing, Google put an additional $2.6 million into 23andMe, following up a $3.9 million investment in 2007. And Google, which has been laying off workers, is renting space to Wojcicki's firm. On what terms? No one outside Google knows, except for one appraiser whose opinion is unclear. From the SEC filing:

In June 2009, Google also entered into a lease agreement with 23andMe... The terms and conditions of the lease with 23andMe were reviewed by an independent real estate appraiser.

It's not clear whether Wojcicki, who recently gave birth to son Benji, will work from the new digs, but the proximity to Brin — and to Google's free child care — would certainly help her keep child-rearing and a high-powered career in easier balance. Whether the deal is as good for Google shareholders remains unclear.

Tapping several sweet spots in web development, Wave aggregates real-time Twitter-esque instant messaging with email, wiki-based collaboration features and social networking.

OK!



(Pic by Niall Kennedy)

"They do this about once a year," Google's nonchalant CEO said of the Microsoft search engine last week. It seemed like he protested too much, and no wonder: Brin is "rattled" by Bing and is personally leading a "team of search-engine specialists in an effort to determine how Bing's crucial search algorithm differs from" Google's, reports the New York Post.

Meanwhile, co-founder Page says he's been prodding his skeptical search team to become more competitive with Twitter (see video below). After layoffs and belt-tightening, it would seem Google is embracing a certain spirit of insecurity, at least at the top. The company should hope this filters down to its more entitled troops; canceling that Disneyland trip is looking like a step in the right direction.

Friends said he had been planning to learn to swim. Brin posted a blog entry remembering Motwani as an accessible teacher and "good friend:"

When my interest turned to data mining, Rajeev helped to coordinate a regular meeting group on the subject. Even though I was just one of hundreds of graduate students in the department, he always made the time and effort to help. Later, when Larry and I began to work together on the research that would lead to Google, Rajeev was there to support us and guide us through challenges, both technical and organizational.

Motwani one of Silicon Valley's many alumni of the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology. He was an early investor in a number of startups, including PayPal. He is survived by his wife and two daughters.

(Picture via Sydney Morning Herald)

"Page's Law" seems destined to become a common companion term to "Moore's Law," a widely-used tech aphorism that says, roughly speaking, that computers double in speed every year or two.

Page's Law is the inverse: It says software gets twice as slow every 18 months. This helps explain why your computer seems to get slower as it ages, even though the hardware inside remains unchanged.

Brin explains the concept in the clip above. He adds that Google plans to reverse this trend and optimize its code. Whatever; the important thing is that it helps his buddy Larry get his name into the history books, in case this Google thing doesn't work out.

I still remember the day I called you up and tried to recruit you to Valleywag — only to learn that that sneaky rapscallion Nick Denton had beaten me to the punch by one whole day in offering you the night shift at Gawker. It all worked out in the end — and perhaps better than I could have imagined back in 2007. But the main lesson I take away from that is that you can get Denton to do pretty much whatever you want if you're patient enough.

Denton, who has a weakness for idle truisms, likes to say that gossip is a young man's game. But you're old enough to remember the first dotcom bubble, and how it popped. That's going to be key in the next few years. We may escape a depression, but Silicon Valley is facing a reckoning nonetheless. Too much venture capital chased too few idea for far too long — and a buoyant economy can no longer hide the startup factory's mistakes.

The biggest mistake you can make is getting too close to your Valley sources and fall for their groupthink in order to ingratiate yourself. (You know how I've scolded you for gullibly buying the hype that Twitter is an amazing source of real-time news. Okay, perhaps it was — for five seconds, before the blowhards, spammers, and self-promoters found it.) At least your schooling will help you remain an outsider: As a Berkeley grad, you'll have an instinctive dislike for the Valley's Stanford in-crowd.

At the same time, don't forget that your years living, studying, and working in the Bay Area give you a better understanding of your beat than anyone can have from 3,000 miles away. Gabriel and Nick, though well-intentioned, have the Manhattan media habit of confusing proximity with relevance. Gawker is much more than New York now — and Valleywag's unique place therein must be firmly grounded in northern California's shaky soil.

Remember: Love is far more powerful than hate. Keep a clear-eyed passion for the Valley. Most tech reporters here secretly loathe their subjects, but try to disguise it with a supine gladhandery as they beg for scoops about new startup website features. They hate themselves and the people they write about. Sad, right? By loving the Valley, you can write about it more honestly than any of them. Just prepare to have your heart broken again, and again, and again. To truly love something, you must love it with all its failings.

For example, the Valley's Alice-in-Wonderland economics — why is Twitter worth more than most startups precisely because it has no revenues to speak of? But the thing you must love most about Silicon Valley — the part of the story the local press corps always skips over in favor of buzzwords, punditry, and lazy analysis — is its people.

The Valley's story is not one of chips and code. It is not a tale of technology. It is the always-running tragicomedy of the people who make technology.

Here are a few characters to watch. I hope it helps — but I can't wait to see who you add to the list.

Marissa Mayer Valleywag's first story remains its best. The public face of Google, Mayer also runs search, the only business that matters there. The cupcake frosting of her girly image — one she assiduously advances at every opportunity — may humanize the otherwise robotic computer scientist. But it is a distraction. The real question to ask about Mayer: Does her spreadsheet-ridden management style scale to new problems beyond search? Are her strengths now turning into limitations?

Mark Zuckerberg Ignore the nerd façade. Facebook's 25-year-old CEO is headstrong and ruthless. Here's the grand irony of Zuckerberg's revolutionary venture: He claims to be all about openness and sharing. But his imperious, my-way-or-the-highway management style has created a fractious culture of dishonesty, delusion, and disillusionment at the social network. His underlings either learn to say things they don't believe, or they move on. This is why Sheryl Sandberg is exactly the wrong COO for Zuckerberg. The veteran of the Clinton Administration has forgotten her Google training and reverted to Washington-player form, where staying on message is all that counts. Facebook's best hope is that Zuckerberg learns from his mistakes — but first he has to recognize them as mistakes.

Carol Bartz Yahoo's CEO swears like a sailor. At last, a boss who has found the right language to describe Yahoo's plight! Bartz brings a refreshing frankness to Yahoo. But the already demoralized troops she inherited will need to start seeing results. Otherwise, Valleywag will continue to be a steady recipient of leaks from Sunnyvale.

Elon Musk The CEO of Tesla Motors and SpaceX is living the geek high life, playing with fast cars, rocket ships, and other people's money. It's wonderful that Musk has realized even a small part of his childhood fantasies. But he risks destroying his dreams by refusing to reconcile them with reality. Factcheck everything Musk says. For example, was he actually running either Zip2 or PayPal, the previous dotcom successes he likes to cite in his bio, when they were sold?

Owen Van Natta Everyone is going to give MySpace's new CEO a pass, because the so-called "social portal" is so clearly troubled. If the former Facebook executive succeeds in a turnaround, it will be viewed as an astonishing achievement; if he fails, people will say no one could save MySpace. That's not fair. Hold his feet to the fire, and judge this disturbingly tan rock-star boss like anyone else on the list.

Peter Thiel Thiel, the PayPal cofounder, likes to brag about how he recruits only the best brains from the best schools to work at Clarium Capital, his hedge fund. Oh, really? Take a look at their résumés on LinkedIn. Like so many of this outspokenly harebrained libertarian's theses, the claim sounds good on paper but doesn't stand up to inspection. Valleywag, alone in Silicon Valley, can take a keen look at Thiel's rhetoric without being dazzled by his inflated wealth.

Tim Armstrong Like Van Natta at MySpace, Armstrong, a Google golden boy now charged with running AOL, will be enjoying a honeymoon. Don't worry: There are plenty of disgruntled AOLers who will gladly help you break up the lovefest.

Jimmy Wales Remind me: What does Wikipedia's founder actually do to earn his keep, besides give speeches? In all this time, I was never able to figure that out. Maybe you can!

Eric Schmidt When did Google's CEO turn into such a raging egomaniac? When the blogosphere was the only corner of the Internet that criticized him, he dismissed it as a "cesspool." But now everyone from Hollywood to the New York Times to the Federal Trade Commission is looking askance at his online empire's practices. "Don't be evil" has turned into "don't get caught." He will, though. Be ready when he does.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin Google's wonder twins have achieved geek nirvana, creating a cloistered campus with free food, lava lamps, and exercise balls to spare. They have a fleet of jets to transport them to rocket launches or rendezvous with Richard Branson and Bono. They've even managed to get married and reproduce. Just one question: Are they still sane? Were they ever?

There are many people who will help you — many of the same people who helped me so much, I hope. They include:

• Nick Denton, for putting up with three years of playing hard to get — and then putting up with much more besides.
• Brian Lam, Choire Sicha, Noah Robischon and Lockhart Steele, for tag-teaming me into taking the job.
• Gabriel Snyder, for expertly steering Valleywag into Gawker's welcoming arms.
• All the Valleywaggers: Paul Boutin, Nick Douglas, Megan McCarthy, Tim Faulkner, Mary Jane Irwin, Jordan Golson, Nicholas Carlson, Jackson West, Melissa Gira Grant, and Tim Woolery. You guys, we've been through so much together!
• Richard Blakeley: We made sweet Photoshop magic together.
• Everyone at Gawker Media: How much do I love you? Far more than just five milligrams.
• Sarah Lacy, Kara Swisher, and Peter Kafka: My peers and fellow purveyors of Valley gossip, you constantly inspired me.
• Countless sources, tipsters, and fellow scribes: Please understand that I esteem you none the less for not naming you here. In fact, your continued anonymity is the best sign of my abiding affection.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Good luck, Ryan. I'll be reading eagerly.

Don't screw it up.

Yours,

Owen
The Valleywag

(Photos by Brian Solis and Scott Beale/Laughing Squid)

Took him long enough. The pair married in December 2007, with Page (net worth $18.6 billion) planting a kiss on his bride on Richard Branson's exclusive Necker Island. Co-founder Sergey Brin and his wife, Anne Wojcicki, have already popped out a billionaire baby boy. We wonder: Will the Pages go with a squad of Stanford-trained nannies, or take their child to Google's gold-plated childcare?

The big idea behind 23andMe and a passel of other gene startups was to make genetic testing affordable and encourage consumers to share their data online, with the notion that they'd then discover patterns linking common diseases. But finding links between diseases and genes has proven much harder than expected.

"With only a few exceptions, what the genomics companies are doing right now is recreational genomics," says David Goldstein, a Duke University geneticist who wrote a recent commentary in the New England Journal of Medicine about the problem. Well, 23andMe does call its test-tube events "spit parties."

In a way, this is a positive for 23andMe, which has come under increasing scrutiny by state regulators for providing an unlicensed medical service. Now Wojcicki can claim, with scientific rigor, that her "tests" are nothing more than a party game. It does raise one question, however: How did a recreational gene-tester with a failed career in biotech investing manage to get a seat on the board of the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health?

There are any number of experienced investors Google might have recruited for its fund. While small in size, Google has a formidable brand and the promise of an easy path to a sale for any company it invests in. Which makes Google's money-manager picks notable.

One partner in the new fund, Rich Miner, was previously an entrepreneur who cofounded Android, a mobile-phone software startup bought by Google in 2005. No surprise there, since former entrepreneurs often become venture capitalists. But they're usually paired with seasoned financial types.

That doesn't exactly describe the other partner, Bill Maris, who has a curiously thin resume. His most notable job before Google? A small San Francisco venture-capital firm named Catalytic Health which hoped to raise the unambitious sum of $10 million. It's not clear if Catalytic Health ever raised money, or made any investments. But no matter. Maris's partner in the firm was Anne Wojcicki, a healthcare investor who went on to consummate a successful merger: She married Google cofounder Sergey Brin in 2007.

A tipster tells us that "for security reasons," Brin and his wife, who's the cofounder of genetics-testing startup 23andMe, have given their son the official name of Benji Wojin (a combination of "Wojcicki" and "Brin").

And sure enough, someone has privately registered the domain name benjiwojin.com. Of course, the legendarily bizarre Brin, who posted pictures of himself in drag, got married in a Speedo, and had guests show up in diapers to a baby shower.

Papa Brin is already putting his son to work as a test subject for mom's business, according to the New York Times, which reports that he plans to have Benji tested for Parkinson's disease:

Mr. Brin and Ms. Wojcicki said they would check whether their son, who was born in November, also has the mutation, though he will not be able to donate his DNA in the usual way - putting saliva in small tubes, as 23andMe has promoted at celebrity-studded "spit parties."
"Babies can't spit into a tube," Mr. Brin said.

The disease is genetic, and runs in Brin's family. His mother, Eugenia, already has developed it, and Brin announced last September that he runs a high risk of developing it himself.

So Brin announced on his blog that he is funding a study that will subsidize the cost of having people with Parkinson's get their DNA tested through 23andMe; they will pay $25 instead of $399, with Brin's grant, one presumes, making up the difference.

This is at once a noble contribution to science — and an outrageous case of nepotism that raises questions of tax evasion.

23andMe is backed financially by Google, which became an investor as it repaid a personal loan Brin made to the company. (Anne Wojcicki's sister, Susan, is also an executive at Google — a position she got after she served as the company's first landlord.)

Previously, Brin had contributed money to the Michael J. Fox Foundation, a prominent charity backed by the actor, who also suffers from Parkinson's. The Fox Foundation then went on to fund a Parkinson's study at 23andMe.

23andMe officially announced the study today — and confirmed that Brin himself provided the funding:

The initiative is made possible through funding by Google co-founder Sergey Brin. Mr. Brin's commitment comes from his personal interest in Parkinson's disease. Brin's mother has Parkinson's and he discovered through 23andMe that he has a genetic predisposition to the disease as well. He explained, "We can make significant progress in understanding Parkinson's disease if individuals join together and contribute their personal experiences to scientific research. Individually, our genes and experiences are lost in a sea of statistical noise. But, taken together they become a high power lens on our inner workings."

Mr. Brin's personal donation substantially underwrites the cost of genotyping the participants, who will pay only $25 compared with the usual commercial price of $399. Individuals who join through the PI and MJFF partnership will have the exact same data, information, tools, and access as individuals who have paid full price for the 23andMe Personal Genome Service.

Let's get this straight:

• Brin is making a charitable donation, presumably tax-free, to the Fox Foundation.
• The Fox Foundation is turning around and giving that money to 23andMe, a for-profit startup cofounded by Brin's wife and financially backed by Brin's company.
• 23andMe will get to count the tests paid for by the charity as revenues, thereby pumping up its financial results, directly benefitting Google and Wojcicki.

We can all applaud Brin's contributions to science. But did he really need to go through what looks like a money-laundering scheme to make them?

(Photo via Edge.org)