BRILLIANT ASKS, leaning close to me and nodding toward Pierre Omidyar, who is standing a few yards away. We’re at a dinner party hosted by Google at the Monterey Bay Aquarium to kick off this year’s TED Conference. Sharks patrol the waters behind us, eels lurk, and the whole room has an aquatic glow. Submit Ticket
Brilliant waves Omidyar over, and the eBay founder -thin, serious, dressed like a grad student – scoots past Al Gore, who is locked in conversation with Cameron Diaz. Brilliant gives Omidyar a half-hug, and the two chat about Omidyar’s three kids and his upcoming trip to India. “Pierre is one of the finest, most decent people in the world,” Brilliant says after Omidyar moves on.
The brief encounter underscores the challenge Bril¬liant faces as the leader of Google’s growing philan¬thropic empire. Hanging out with billionaires, after all, is not the same thing as being a billionaire. As the head of DotOrg, Brilliant derives his power and moral author¬ity from the fact that he is not part of this crowd, that he retains his ability to sit in a room with a bunch of CEOs and tell them that their doomsday profiteering is stupid. It’s his connection to human suffering, not his connec¬tion to money, that is his gift. If he loses that connection, he loses everything — and he knows it. “It’s easy to forget the real purpose of my work,” says Brilliant. “Behind all the numbers and the meetings, lives are at stake.” No Announcements to Display
For Google itself, the risk of launching DotOrg has lit¬tle to do with money or losing focus on its core business. It has to do with trust. “It has to be clear that this effort is not about gaining commercial advantage but about changing the world,” says Doerr. Right now, Google is able to deflect many questions about privacy and cor¬porate evildoings simply because Sergey Brin and Larry Page seem like honest guys. But the more the company moves into new arenas, like energy and public health, the more danger there is that Google could be revealed to be just another greedy corporation using philanthropy as a mask to hide its plundering and profiteering.
Brilliant, with his unshakable belief in human will, remains certain that DotOrg can be a force for good in the world. What worries him today is not evil corpo¬rations, but religious intolerance. After all, for a man who believes that love is all we need, nothing is more frightening than hatred. “I used to think terrorism was a virus, and love was the antidote,” he says. “What keeps me up at night is that Americans don’t understand there is goodness in every religion. What worries me is that we may not understand that we are all in this together. How do we build a world where we love each other more than we hate each other?”
For the moment, Larry Brilliant is balancing on the tightrope between promises made and promises yet to be kept. At the TED Conference, Jeff Skoll, another eBay billionaire turned philanthropreneur, drifts over to talk about a recent trip they took to India together. Movie producer Lawrence Bender says hello, and Brilliant art¬fully bats down a rumor that he once had an affair with Mia Farrow (“Don’t I wish!” he jokes). Tomorrow night, there will be the billionaires’ dinner, and the following day, eighteen holes at Pebble Beach.
Brilliant is not unaware of the contradictions be¬tween the many worlds he inhabits, but it’s clear that he himself, like the philanthropy he is pursuing, is sort of a hybrid – hippie and techie, humanist and capitalist, optimist and realist. When I ask him if he ever fears he has sold his soul for an invitation to the Billionaires Ball, he leans over again, almost whispering in my ear.
“It’s like my friend Wavy says,” he tells me. “The art
of life is putting your little bit of good where it will do
the most.”
