The great circle of grifting
By 
A couple of days ago I noticed that RFK Jr. had somehow raised $75 million for his vanity presidential campaign (by comparison Marianne Williamson, who is still running for the Democratic party nomination yo, has raised five million, and Cornel West has raised $853,000, which I can only hope he’s skimming to pay off some back child support). I was wondering where he was managing to dig up that kind of scratch, and the answer turns out to be:
Nicole Shanahan, the running mate of independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., announced an $8 million pledge to Kennedy’s bid for the White House during a comedy show fundraiser Wednesday night in Nashville, Tennessee, according to audio of the event shared with CNN.
The wealthy Silicon Valley patent attorney laughed off the suggestion that “Bobby only picked her for her money” as she argued the capital would allow Americans to have an additional choice come November. She also said she wasn’t Kennedy’s first choice.
“Hey, right now, we are in third place but we can win. I’m proof,” Shanahan said to laughter. “I was in third place behind Aaron Rodgers and Hulk Hogan.”
Shanahan did not detail how the money would be used but the campaign is engaged in an aggressive and costly effort to get on the ballot in all 50 states, and Kennedy is determined to qualify for CNN’s presidential debate next month.
“CNN is letting us still try to qualify. And we all know that Bobby is going to win bigly when that happens,” she told the crowd.
To qualify for CNN’s June 27 debate, candidates must appear on enough state ballots to be eligible for at least 270 Electoral College votes and receive at least 15% support in four separate national polls that meet CNN’s polling standards. Kennedy has received at least 15% in two qualifying polls so far, and is currently on the ballot in six states, making him currently eligible for 89 electoral college votes.
Shanahan, a deep-pocketed investor, had previously given $2 million to Kennedy’s campaign and has said she has given $4 million to the pro-Kennedy super PAC American Values 2024 in order to help fund a Super Bowl television advertisement.
I was like woah a patent attorney who has enough money lying around to fund a whole semi-real presidential campaign all by herself! I mean I’ve heard of the million-dollar law degree, but this sounds pretty special. Then I checked her resume, found that she’s still in her 30s, and graduated from Santa Clara Law School — a law school with some of the worst employment stats of any ABA law school in the country — and I was even more impressed.
How did this happen exactly?
In 2013, Shanahan married Jeremy Asher Kranz, a San Francisco Bay Area investor[3] and finance executive;[47] they divorced in 2015.[48]
Shanahan met Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, in the summer of 2014, at a yoga festival in Lake Tahoe;[7] they married in 2018.[7][8] They have a daughter together,[2] born in 2018.[29] Brin and Shanahan maintained an estate at Point Dume in Malibu, California, purchased in 2020.[49]
Shanahan and Brin separated in December 2021,[2][50] and Brin filed for divorce in January 2022.[50] In 2022, the Wall Street Journal reported that a reason for the breakup was a “brief affair” in 2021 between Shanahan and Elon Musk.[50][47] Shanahan[2] and Musk have denied the report.[51] The Wall Street Journal said: “We are confident in our sourcing, and we stand by our reporting.”[2] Shanahan and Brin had signed a prenuptial agreement. During the divorce proceedings, Shanahan’s attorneys argued that she had signed the prenuptial agreement under duress, and in mediation sought more than $1 billion of Brin’s $95 billion fortune.[47] The divorce was finalized in 2023 in a confidential arbitration.[7][8][52] Forbes reported that Shanahan likely received around 2.6 million Alphabet Class B shares from Brin, worth $390 million in March 2024, and possibly received an additional, equal amount of Class C shares.[42]
In 2023, Shanahan held a “love ceremony” of commitment with Jacob Strumwasser, who is an advisor at Lightning Labs, a Bitcoin software company. She described the event as a handfasting ceremony influenced by Druidic tradition.[53] The pair met at the Burning Man festival in summer 2022.[53][54]
“Don’t marry for money: Go where the money is, and fall in love.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald, supposedly.
The Burning Man thing is kind of a nice touch for the writers, though some might find it a touch heavy-handed. The Musk affair is just gross; class it up a little more people!
Shanahan is an anti-vaxx nut, with a bunch of closely related wack job theories about how IVF fertility treatments are conspiracy of some nefarious sort, and how sunlight can help women get pregnant in their 50s, which is no doubt how she got all tangled up with Nepo Baby Failson in the first place.