Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on February 18, 2025.
As a donor, Sergey Brin is best known for writing multimillion-dollar checks for Parkinson’s disease research. Yet in the past few years, the Google cofounder has quietly become one of the nation’s top climate and environmental funders — and in 2024, his footprint got even bigger.
The 51-year-old’s Sergey Brin Family Foundation made nearly $243 million in climate-related awards in 2024, while his billion-dollar nonprofit advocacy group Catalyst4 Inc. granted almost $22 million on climate, according to data provided to IP by the two groups.
Last year’s climate giving marks a substantial step up for Brin. His foundation sent roughly $147 million to such causes in 2023, while Catalyst4, a 501c4 that he formed after selling his Tesla shares following a falling out with Elon Musk, made $14 million in awards to climate-related advocacy groups, based on that data. In other words, the two operations increased their combined climate giving by 64% in 2024.
Brin is now among the largest backers of climate action in the world, rivaling megadonors like Mike Bloomberg and legacy funders such as the Rockefeller Foundation. And the fast growth of his grantmaking in this area, not to mention a fortune Forbes puts at nearly $150 billion as of this writing, leaves open the possibility that there’s more to come.
Not that Brin is looking for attention. A representative of the foundation declined to comment, and nine grantees either declined or did not respond to requests for interviews. As I noted in a 2023 profile, his now-$4 billion foundation is among the nation’s largest. It granted more than $376 million in 2023, but remains a low-profile operation without a website or other public presence.
One of its only public statements on this body of work came in ClimateWorks Foundation’s 2023 annual report: “We entered the climate space in 2021 with a desire to invest resources where they are needed most and a willingness to take risks to catalyze a rapid and equitable energy transition,” said Ashley Anderson, managing director of philanthropy for Bayshore, Brin’s family office.
One priority, at least initially, was areas with relatively less investment. “Our support for ClimateWorks has allowed us to move the needle on under-addressed sectors like heavy-duty trucking, shipping and aviation that have made comparably limited decarbonization progress despite their emissions,” Anderson added.
Generally, the operation has adopted a below-the-radar approach that has become a signature of many tech billionaires, along with the use of sometimes abstrusely named nonprofits and LLCs in addition to foundations. One example is K18N, a $1.5-billion supporting organization created in 2022, apparently by WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum, which shares a president and some of the same board members with Koum’s foundation.
With Brin’s climate spending fast rising, I reviewed the recent 990 forms of the Sergey Brin Family Foundation and Catalyst4 to see what they tell us about these operations and the current trends in the tech centibillionaire’s climate giving.
Catalyst4: Brin’s off-the-radar 501c4 with $1 billion in assets
Legally headquartered in a Palo Alto outpost of the UPS Store that sits a couple doors down from a ramen chain restaurant, Catalyst4 has nearly $1.1 billion in assets. It appears to be less an organization than a legal entity created to move money. Specifically, the three-year-old nonprofit seems to serve as the 501c4 advocacy arm of Brin’s climate operation. (Incidentally, it’s not the only billionaire giving vehicle technically based in a UPS branch.)
The nonprofit’s largest grant in 2023 ($50 million) went to the Michael J. Fox Foundation, a 501c3, with which Brin has closely partnered and has sent hundreds of millions of dollars. Yet five of its six other awards went to 501c4 organizations — the awards were described as “environmental grants” in the group’s IRS filing.
Grantees included the Energy Action Fund ($24 million), a San Francisco-based group focused on clean energy markets and policy, and two organizations best known as fiscal sponsors, the Sixteen Thirty Fund ($4 million) and the Fund for a Better Future ($3 million).
Like the Sergey Brin Family Foundation, Catalyst4 lists no staff in its IRS filings, only board officers. Unlike the foundation, Brin is not on the board or otherwise mentioned, though several of the nonprofit’s officers have ties to his other operations. Bloomberg first revealed Brin had started the group in 2023.
Catalyst4’s officers include Robert Brown, who is also its president, and Tara Farnsworth, the secretary and treasurer. Each is also on the board of the Sergey Brin Family Foundation. A third director, Ekemini Riley, is also the managing director of Aligning Science Across Parkinson’s, or ASAP, a research initiative funded by Brin.
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The Sergey Brin Family Foundation’s climate funding
The Sergey Brin Family Foundation’s largest climate grants to date, at least publicly, have gone to the think tank and regrantor Climate Imperative, which is a favorite of tech donors like Laurene Powell Jobs and venture capitalist John Doerr. Brin’s foundation sent it $40 million in both 2022 and 2023.
Like many new billionaire-backed operations, SBFF has scaled up its grantmaking in part by cutting major checks to the nation’s top intermediaries. In 2023, the most recent year for which data is available, those grantees included the U.S. Energy Foundation ($29 million) and Tara Climate ($5 million).
“We recognized that climate philanthropy is a complex and nuanced ecosystem — one we were eager to learn from and contribute to alongside credible partners and regrantors like ClimateWorks Foundation,” Anderson said in ClimateWorks’ annual report.
Another top theme in 2023 was clean energy, based on the shorthand used in 990 grant descriptions. Recipients in this category ranged widely, including the Pacific Environment and Resources Center ($5 million), the National Wildlife Federation ($3.3 million), Advanced Energy Institute ($2.5 million), and the green fiscal sponsor Multiplier ($2 million).
The foundation also made a lot of awards for work related to wildfire management in 2023, though many were six figures or smaller. Recipients included Resources Legacy Fund ($12.5 million); Audubon Canyon Ranch ($1.2 million); and the Cultural Fire Management Council ($1 million).
Zero-emissions transportation also got a few nods, with grants to the Aspen Institute ($4.2 million) for related programming; the transportation technology network CalStart ($2.5 million); and the legal nonprofit EarthJustice ($2.5 million) for its Right to Zero transportation program.
With the Trump administration attempting to halt virtually all federal funding for climate action, new money from billionaires like Brin will be ever-more precious to climate groups in the years ahead. That’s doubly the case as billionaire tech donors, and maybe even some of the biggest climate heavyweights, are seeking to appease Trump in ways that might eat into their green giving.
The tech founder and his peers cannot be expected to substitute for government dollars, yet Brin and many others are still operating well below their philanthropic ceiling, given their stupendous wealth. Perhaps last year’s spike shows Brin is ready to rise to the occasion?
