Sergey Brin's new girlfriend: Three reasons why we care about Amanda Rosenberg

By now, everyone knows Google co-founder Sergey Brin is in a relationship with Amanda Rosenberg, a Google employee, a few months after he separated from his wife. Brin’s personal affair, as well as curiosity about his relationship with Rosenberg, has rocketed both to the top of Google searches and Twitter trends.

On the face of it, some might wonder why we care about who a rich geek is sleeping with. But good gossip happens where money, power and good looks meet, and Silicon Valley is the hot new destination for all three. Amanda Rosenberg is just the first casualty, having been ripped apart as a ‘home-wrecker’ and ‘social climber’ online, though there is no evidence to suggest that she is either.

[caption id=“attachment_1079681” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Amanda Rosenberg. Image via Google.[/caption]

But to break it down better than a simplification of ‘power, money and good looks,’ here’s why we all care about Silicon Valley, and who Sergey Brin is sleeping with.

1. No really, there’s a lot of money involved

Sergey Brin and his wife have been touted - after the demise of their marriage became public - as a couple that could have been the next Bill and Melinda Gates.

His ex-wife, Anne Wojcicki, was with him before he became the cult Silicon Valley figure he is now. Brin is one of the world’s richest men, currently valued at around $22.8 billion. Brin and Wojcicki also have a lot of business involvement. Not only is she the sister of a top Google executive, but she and Brin are also co-investors in 23andMe (a DNA testing company), Breakthrough Prize Foundation (a non-profit organisation they run with Mark and Priscilla Zuckerberg) and also co-buy real estate in their neighbourhood.

The couple has also been immensely active in philanthropy.“According to the Chronicle of Philanthropy, Wojcicki and Brin gave away $223 million in 2012,the fifth-most for donors in the U.S., and they each contributed $190.1 million to their Brin Wojcicki Foundation,” noted AllThingsD in its financial postmortem of the couple’s split. ‘They have also given tens of millions of dollars to the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research."

So what happens to these projects? Brin and his ex-wife will continue to work on their projects together, and while they have said that they “respect each other and remain friendly,” one can assume that a lot of tense meetings lay ahead for the employees of these initiatives.

2. Silicon Valley is chock-a-block with new-age celebrities

Silicon Valley knows how to market itself. The area has more cult figures (who admittedly still remain the shadow of the likes of Zuckerberg and Brin) per square feet than anywhere else. Massive dissertations are churned out about every company event, for example, a new hardware manager being brought aboard.

In September of last year, a blog in the New York Times made an interesting point while detailing the happenings at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference being held in San Francisco. Despite having Hollywood actor Jessica Alba in the room, the real celebrities were the tech geeks. For example, attendees jostled to get a good view of “Zuck”, ie, Mark Zuckerberg, whom the newspaper refers to as the “Elvis Presley of our era.”

“In many respects, tech celebrities, who now grace the covers of glossy magazines and TV shows, are now as popular as Hollywood celebrities,” explainedEric Kuhn to the New York Times , social media agent at United Talent Agency, based in Beverly Hills, who was attending TechCrunch Disrupt.

This techie fandom, which is taking its cues from adoration that used to be reserved for Hollywood stars, gives us a hint into why anyone cares who Sergei Brin is dating. The fact that he is dating a colleague, Amanda Rosenberg, six months after he separated from his wife, is on the face of it, not very interesting to anyone who’s not standing around the Google watercooler.

But clearly, it is.

3. Amanda Rosenberg is pretty hot, and Sergey’s not bad either

Half-Chinese and half-Jewish, Rosenberg is a red-haired, beautiful, and presumably intelligent woman. She possesses all the beguiling features any gossip-hungry blogger could hope for in the stereotype of the ‘other woman." She is ripe to be taken down a peg or two by cyber bullies, who have attacked her Google Plus page with joyful sadism, as though she is the man who left a wife and two kids, and not Brin.

On the other hand,Brin is an affable, scruffy-faced techie with a lot of money, and is a catch by any standard. A Silicon Valley demigod, Brin was once described as “trim and boyishlyhandsome, with dark hair and penetrating eyes,” in MomentMag.com . But he’s mostly been let off the hook by the gossip jury.

Here are some samples of the kind of heat Rosenberg is at the receiving end of:

‘Bill Kowba’ commented on her picture: ‘Was this photo taken before or after you slept with a married man and destroyed his marriage.?’

‘Jan Vries’ wrote: ‘You are such a soulless person. No morality. Ruining a man’s life. Think of his two children…Shame on you.’

As soon as news broke about Amanda and Brin’s “affair”, she shot into the top five most-Googled words in the USA. In an article titled ‘Let’s Google the Hussy’, the New York Post dove into the matter like a nosy neighbour. “She bedded two bosses,” exulted the article. “‘Every fellow Googler knows she slept with not one but two bosses within the same 8 months,’ user Audrey Winters posted in a message on Rosenberg’s page. ‘OK, Glass, find conniving in the dictionary.’”

“She’s good at playing men - she played me,” said Rosenberg’s ex-boyfriend Ewan Butler to the Daily Mail. “Amanda’s a good-looking girl, and she knows she is…sheknew the power of her womanly ways.“Apparently the biggest insult this spurned ex could come up with is that Amanda is beautiful and possesses self-awareness.

Another one of Rosenberg’s ‘gossip-friendly’ decisions is that she dated another Google employee before dating Brin -senior executive Hugo Barra, who recently announced he was leaving to join a Chinese computer firm. The story is ripe for gossip, complete with a woman the public can easily fit into an easy and objectified stereotype.

But to be fair, it doesn’t seem like Rosenberg is the type who would mind. In an internet profile of hers written in 2010, Rosenberg wrote that her motto was:‘He who hesitates is a damned fool.’