Who will get the LLC? Inside a Silicon Valley billionaire’s divorce.

In 2014, Scott Hassan, recognized by some because the third Google founder, despatched Allison Huynh, his spouse of 13 years, a textual content message that their marriage was over and that he was shifting out of their dwelling.
Nearly seven years later, the pair are nonetheless locked in litigation over tips on how to divide an property with tech investments and prime California properties estimated to be value billions of {dollars}.
A trial anticipated to start out Monday will provide an uncommon, public peek into the main points of a big-money Silicon Valley divorce. They embrace Hassan’s failed try to influence Huynh to signal a so-called postnuptial settlement and his admission that he began a web site in her identify to publicize embarrassing info from her previous.
Technology billionaires have sometimes divorced quietly behind closed doorways — a few of them various instances. While the typically disagreeable particulars of the ends of their marriages have typically discovered their methods into the information, it’s uncommon that they’re keen to commerce blows in a public courtroom and expose the complicated net of their private funds.
When Google co-founder Sergey Brin and Anne Wojcicki, who began the genetic testing firm 23andMe, cut up after eight years of marriage in 2015, they employed a non-public decide to hash out the main points. The latest divorces of Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos have been additionally dealt with in non-public.
But Huynh and Hassan are headed to courtroom in Santa Clara County, California, bereft of the secrecy that cash should purchase. Exactly why that has occurred is a matter of dispute. She stated Hassan had refused to take their case to non-public judging. He stated a non-public decide wouldn’t essentially preserve proceedings non-public and would require them to pay for a retired decide or impartial lawyer.
Huynh has accused Hassan of participating in “divorce terrorism,” utilizing authorized ways to tug out the proceedings. In an interview, Huynh, 46, stated Hassan had instructed her that he deliberate to “bury her” and be sure that she “gets nothing.”
Hassan, 51, denied saying that in written solutions to questions from The New York Times. “At the end of a relationship and through a divorce this lengthy, things are never easy, and no one is at their best,” he wrote.
Hassan is just not a family identify, definitely not like Brin or Larry Page, the boys credited with beginning Google. But with out Hassan’s contribution, Google might have been nothing greater than a pc science venture at Stanford University.
He was a analysis assistant at Stanford’s pc science division, which made him the resident programmer for a lot of doctoral college students, when he met Page, a doctoral candidate. He rewrote the code for a sluggish net crawler that Page had created to know the connection between hyperlinks on totally different web sites. He additionally labored with Brin to construct a search engine, which ultimately turned Google.
When Page and Brin based Google in 1998, Hassan purchased 160,000 shares for $800. When Google went public in 2004, the shares have been value greater than $200 million. The shares, now in Google’s mum or dad firm, Alphabet, could be valued at greater than $13 billion at this time.
While Hassan by no means labored for Google, he was one of many founders of an organization referred to as eGroups, which was bought to Yahoo in 2000 for $432 million in inventory. He additionally began two robotics companies.
Hassan met Huynh by mutual buddies at Stanford in 2000. She had emigrated to the United States from Vietnam after the warfare and attended Stanford on scholarship. Huynh stated she had dropped out a couple of years earlier than assembly Hassan to pursue alternatives in the course of the dot-com increase. She was working as a marketing consultant and net developer, constructing web sites for shoppers akin to Wells Fargo.
In 2001, 5 days earlier than Christmas, they acquired married on the Little White Chapel in Las Vegas. There was no dialogue of a prenuptial settlement, and so they barely mentioned funds, each of them stated.
Huynh stated she had supported the household financially within the early years. She stated Hassan had $60,000 in debt, so she typically paid for meals, journey and leisure — together with their engagement get together, which Page and Brin attended.
Hassan stated that was not true and that by the point they have been married, he was financially safe and debt-free. In addition to the Google inventory, which was nonetheless a speculative funding on the time, he owned a home in San Francisco in addition to $8 million in Yahoo inventory — which had misplaced a lot of its worth after the sale of his firm — and Amazon inventory, he stated.
Huynh stated she had put her profession on maintain to boost their youngsters and help Hassan with the enterprise. The situation of cash got here up 4 years into their marriage, across the time of their oldest daughter’s second birthday.
Less than a 12 months after Google went public, Hassan proposed a deal in change for waiving any future claims to marital belongings. Hassan supplied Huynh $20 million in Google inventory — lower than 10% of his shares — and half of three Bay Area actual property properties: homes in Palo Alto and San Francisco and a business constructing in Menlo Park. She felt blindsided and damage. She refused.
Hassan stated he had proposed the settlement to share a few of his newfound wealth.
Later that 12 months, they moved into an even bigger Palo Alto dwelling in one of many metropolis’s most prosperous neighborhoods. Huynh lives within the 7,500-square-foot dwelling, valued at $20 million on Redfin, with the youngsters.
Still, Huynh stated there was little indication that Hassan was sad. But in 2014, whereas she was on a enterprise journey for MyDream, a digital actuality firm she began in 2011, she obtained a textual content message from Hassan informing her that the wedding was over and that he was shifting out, she stated.
“I was shocked,” she stated. “I kept saying to him, ‘You must be kidding.’”
Hassan stated it mustn’t have come as a shock to her. He stated they’d a giant combat a couple of days earlier, when she falsely accused him of infidelity in entrance of their youngsters. She stated she had by no means accused him of dishonest however questioned his whereabouts throughout lengthy absences from the home.
After a couple of makes an attempt at counseling, they separated in January 2015.
Since then, they’ve tangled within the courts. Hassan’s possession of his Alphabet shares is just not in query within the divorce. They are preventing over a smaller, hard-to-define slice of their property.
Huynh sued in 2019 to halt the sale of one in every of Hassan’s companies, a robotics agency referred to as Suitable Technologies, to a Danish firm for $400,000. As a shareholder, she accused Hassan of promoting Suitable for under market worth to realize a private tax profit. The sale didn’t undergo, and Suitable filed for chapter.
Hassan stated that regardless of lending Suitable $90 million of his cash, the corporate was nonetheless dropping greater than $1 million a month. He tried to solicit gives from Google, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft, however none of them have been . He stated he had accepted the one provide he obtained.
The couple formally dissolved their marriage in May 2020 and agreed to joint custody of their three teenage youngsters.
Next week’s trial is a part of a drawn-out authorized course of to divide the property and resolve different monetary issues together with spousal and youngster help. California is one in every of 9 states the place belongings acquired throughout marriage are divided evenly in a divorce.
In 2006, Hassan fashioned a restricted legal responsibility firm referred to as Greenheart Investments. In a pretrial submitting, legal professionals for Huynh stated Greenheart had invested in additional than 15 know-how companies and greater than 30 actual property properties, together with a 195-unit residence complicated in Menlo Park, lower than 1 mile from Facebook’s workplaces. Greenheart was valued at greater than $1 billion in 2015, the submitting stated.
Huynh stated Hassan owns greater than 50 restricted legal responsibility corporations to carry his tech investments and actual property properties. Hassan stated there have been extra like 20 for his actual property holdings in addition to two “umbrella” LLCs for his different investments.
Huynh stated Greenheart must be thought of group property as a result of Hassan repeatedly muddied the road between his belongings and their shared property. But Hassan’s legal professionals stated in a authorized temporary that they’d argue that the corporate must be thought of his separate property as a result of it had been began along with his premarital belongings.
As the trial has approached, the feud has taken a harsh flip. This month, Huynh discovered a web site — allisonhuynh.com — along with her photograph, hyperlinks to her social media accounts and information stories about her. It additionally included a authorized submitting about her from 20 years in the past, which was now not obtainable on-line and included salacious particulars a few previous relationship.
The web site hid the identification of the individual behind it. But Huynh ultimately found that somebody named Scott Wendell had uploaded the authorized filings. Wendell is Hassan’s center identify.

Hassan admitted that he had made the positioning in “a moment of frustration” as a result of Huynh and her legal professionals have been telling “one-sided stories” to the press. “I realize that this was not the right way to go about this, and it only ended up making our dispute more public and tense,” he wrote in an e-mail to the Times. Hassan stated he had taken down the positioning.
Huynh, who completed her diploma at Stanford final 12 months, stated the web site may have damage her repute at a time when she was attempting to launch new companies, together with a cellular recreation, the Adoraboos, which goals to show youngsters about blockchains and cryptocurrencies.
Hassan stated that whereas they didn’t agree on what was truthful, he didn’t consider that his ex-wife ought to get nothing.
“I have no doubt we will land on a resolution that makes her a woman with generational wealth,” Hassan wrote.