Susan Wojcicki was the most powerful woman in tech, but to five people, she was just "Mom."
Most people know her as the woman who rented her garage to Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Or the CEO who turned YouTube into a global titan. But behind the boardroom meetings and product launches, there was a deeply private life centered around her five children.
Honestly, finding information about susan wojcicki kids used to be like trying to find a needle in a digital haystack. She was fiercely protective of them. She didn't parade them on red carpets. She didn't use them for "relatable" social media branding.
Then, 2024 happened. It was a year of unimaginable tragedy for the Wojcicki-Troper family.
A household of five
Susan and her husband, Dennis Troper, married in 1998. They didn't just build a career at Google; they built a massive family. Five kids. In Silicon Valley, that’s practically a small village.
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She was actually four months pregnant with her first child when she joined Google as employee number 16. People told her she was crazy. They said joining a startup while pregnant was career suicide. She did it anyway.
By the time she took over as CEO of YouTube in 2014, she was pregnant with her fifth. Think about that for a second. Running one of the most influential platforms on the planet while prepping for a fifth newborn. It’s a level of "busy" most of us can't even fathom.
The TRICK philosophy
You can't talk about how Susan raised her children without mentioning her mother, Esther Wojcicki. Esther is a legendary educator who wrote the book How to Raise Successful People. She used an acronym called TRICK:
- Trust
- Respect
- Independence
- Collaboration
- Kindness
Susan lived this. She wasn't a "helicopter parent." She believed in giving her kids the space to fail and the autonomy to figure things out. She once mentioned that being a mom actually made her a better executive. It forced her to prioritize. It taught her how to focus on the things that were growing fast and ignore the "slow-growing" noise.
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The Marco Troper tragedy
The world's eyes turned toward susan wojcicki kids in February 2024 for the most heartbreaking reason possible. Her son, Marco Troper, was found unresponsive in his dorm room at UC Berkeley. He was only 19.
Marco was a freshman, a math major who was reportedly "truly loving" his time at college. The news was a gut punch. Later, it was revealed that he died from an accidental drug overdose involving a combination of substances, including high levels of alprazolam and cocaine.
It was a stark, humanizing moment. Even for a family with all the resources in the world, the opioid and fentanyl crisis—and the dangers of "party drugs"—remains a terrifying reality.
The final goodbye
Just six months after losing Marco, Susan herself passed away in August 2024. She had been fighting non-small cell lung cancer for two years.
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Dennis Troper's tribute to her was devastatingly simple. He called her his best friend and a "loving mother." The family she left behind—her husband and her four surviving children—has had to navigate a double layer of grief that is frankly hard to imagine.
We don't know the names of all the children. We don't have a list of their birthdays or their favorite hobbies. And honestly? That's exactly how Susan wanted it. She gave the world YouTube, but she kept her kids for herself.
What we can learn from her legacy
If you're looking for "actionable insights" from how Susan handled her family life, it's not about being a "supermom" or having it all. It's about boundaries.
- Prioritize ruthlessly: Susan was famous for trying to be home for dinner every night. Even as a CEO.
- Trust over control: Following the TRICK method means letting go. It means trusting that the values you instill will guide them when you aren't there.
- Privacy is a choice: In an era of oversharing, Susan proved you can be a public figure without making your children public property.
The story of susan wojcicki kids is one of immense success, extreme privacy, and lately, profound loss. It serves as a reminder that behind every "powerful" headline is a human being dealing with the same messy, beautiful, and sometimes tragic realities of family life as the rest of us.
If you want to honor that legacy, perhaps the best thing to do is look at the "TRICK" pillars—Trust, Respect, Independence, Collaboration, Kindness—and see which one you can lean into more with your own family today.