NEW YORK (AFP)---Google co-founder, Sergey Brin, who made a fortune helping the world navigate the Internet, is again looking to the future and pioneering the fledging dreams of space travel for all.
The 34-year-old billionaire has reserved his seat on a flight to the stars, hoping to be among the first generation of space tourists, with a five-million dollar investment in a US space travel agency.
"I am a big believer in the exploration and commercial development of the
space frontier, and am looking forward to the possibility of going into space," Brin said in a statement Wednesday.
He has reserved his seat on a flight to the International Space Station with the company Space Adventures, which announced on Wednesday that a Soyuz
rocket would take off in 2011 with two tourists on board.
Brin is a stellar example of the meteoric rise of a generation of young Internet pioneers.
The son of Jewish mathematicians who fled Moscow in 1979, he was just six years old when he arrived in the United States. He still speaks Russian at home with his parents.
A maths whizz, Brin entered Stanford University to study computer sciences.
It was there in 1995 that he met Larry Page and with him launched Google from a California garage.
So convinced were they by their invention of the Internet search engine which uses key words to help rank Internet pages, that they dropped out of their studies never finishing their doctorates.
The pair used their mathematics skills to index and rank websites in order of how often they were linked -- and to show search results in that order.
After tests on a secondhand computer in Page's bedroom, the two quit school, begged and borrowed one million dollars from friends and associates and launched Google in September 1998.
Google went online with a simple recipe. It had just a logo and a search engine while rivals such as Yahoo packed their homepages with sports scores,
weather forecasts, news headlines and adverts.
But Google's extraordinary success enabled the pair to become two of the youngest billionaires on the planet heading what some call one of the world's most dynamic companies, which has transformed business on the Internet.
The boyish-looking Brin is estimated to have a net worth of 18.7 billion dollars, according to a list by Forbes magazine which ranks him number 32 among the world's wealthiest individuals.
The Google co-founders were at first considered business upstarts, respected for their motto "You Can Make Money Without Doing Evil."
They said in an open letter accompanying their initial public offering filing that they were determined to retain the unique character of their company.
"Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one,"
the co-founders wrote.
Google went public in 2004 with the biggest initial public offering since the dot-com boom, making Brin and his partner instant billionaires.
The shares kept shooting up from the offering price of 85 dollars to over 700 dollars last year, and are currently hovering around 550 dollars.
In 2007, Google reported total profits of 4.2 billion dollars as compared with 3.08 billion in 2006, as revenues jumped to 16.6 billion dollars.
Its dominance of the web has led to the coinage of "Google" as a verb, but also sparked criticism that the company may be too powerful, possibly threatening online privacy.
But Brin told a 2003 forum that "people tend to exaggerate Google's significance."
"Some say Google is God. Others say Google is Satan. But if they think Google is too powerful, remember that with search engines, unlike other companies, all it takes is a single click to go to another search engine.
People come to Google because they choose to. We don't trick them."
Last year, Google revealed it invested some 3.9 million dollars in 23andMe, a company co-founded by Brin's wife Anne Wojcicki in 2006.
The union of Brin and Wojcicki is a Silicon Valley love story. She is a daughter of a professor at Stanford University. Her sister, Susan, rented the garage of her house in Menlo Park, California, to Brin and Page to use as offices to launch their company.
