Eric Emerson Schmidt (born April 27, 1955) is an American businessman and former software engineer who served as the CEO of Google from 2001 to 2011 and the company’s executive chairman from 2011 to 2015, as executive chairman of parent company Alphabet Inc. from 2015 to 2017, and Technical Advisor at Alphabet from 2017 to 2020. In April 2022, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index estimated his net worth to be US$25.1 billion.
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As an intern at Bell Labs, Schmidt in 1975 was co-author of Lex, a software program to generate lexical analysers for the Unix computer operating system. From 1997 to 2001, he was chief executive officer (CEO) of Novell. Schmidt has served on various other boards in academia and industry, including the boards of trustees for Carnegie Mellon University, Apple, Princeton University, and the Mayo Clinic. He also owns a minority stake in the Washington Commanders of the National Football League (NFL).
In 2008, during his tenure as Google’s chairman, Schmidt campaigned for Barack Obama, and subsequently became a member of Obama’s President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, with Eric Lander. Lander later became Joe Biden‘s science advisor. In the meantime, Schmidt had left Google, and founded philanthropic venture Schmidt Futures, in 2017. Under Schmidt’s tenure, Schmidt Futures provided the compensation for two science-office employees in the Office of Science and Technology Policy. In October 2021, Schmidt founded the Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP).
The majority of Schmidt’s fortune is derived from a 1% economic interest in Alphabet, the parent company of Google, the world’s largest search engine, according to Net Market Share.
He owns about 68 million million apiece of the company’s class A and B shares, with the B shares convertible on a share-for-share basis into the publicly traded class A stock, according to the 2023 proxy filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Schmidt owns these shares directly, through a family foundation and a limited partnership. He also owns the equivalent of about 80 million shares of class C stock, according to a 2019 filing.
Schmidt has collected about $4 billion from the sale of Google stock, based on an analysis of company filings and Bloomberg data. The value of his cash investments is based on an analysis of these proceeds insider transactions, taxes and charitable contributions. Some of the proceeds have been used to finance two of his investment companies, TomorrowVentures, a venture capital firm that has invested in scores of startup companies, and Innovation Endeavors, which funds young entrepreneurs. Schmidt is also the founder of Schmidt Futures, an impact investment firm that backs early-stage technology firms.
Schmidt’s family office Hillspire bought a 20% stake in hedge fund D.E. Shaw in April 2015, according to a company statement. No price was disclosed. The stake is valued by price-to-AUM ratio of three public hedge funds — Man, Janus Henderson and Sculptor — using firm-stated assets under management as of June 1, 2023 of $60 billion. A key-man risk of 25% is deducted to reach the value.
Hillspire didn’t respond to emailed requests for comment on Schmidt’s net worth.
Early life
Schmidt was born in Falls Church, Virginia, and grew up in Falls Church and Blacksburg, Virginia.[4][19] He is one of three sons of Eleanor, who had a master’s degree in psychology, and Wilson Emerson Schmidt, a professor of international economics at Virginia Tech and Johns Hopkins University, who worked at the U.S. Treasury Department during the Nixon Administration. Schmidt spent part of his childhood in Italy as a result of his father’s work and has stated that it had changed his outlook.
Schmidt graduated from Yorktown High School in the Yorktown neighborhood of Arlington County, Virginia, in 1972, after earning eight varsity letter awards in long-distance running. He attended Princeton University, starting as an architecture major and switching to electrical engineering, earning a Bachelor of Science in Engineering degree in 1976.
From 1976 to 1980, Schmidt resided at the International House Berkeley, where he met his future wife, Wendy Boyle. In 1979, at the University of California, Berkeley, Schmidt earned an M.S. degree for designing and implementing a network (Berknet) linking the campus computer center with the CS and EECS departments. There, he also earned a PhD degree in 1982 in EECS, with a dissertation about the problems of managing distributed software development and tools for solving these problems.
Career
Early career
Early in his career, Schmidt held a series of technical positions with IT companies including Byzromotti Design, Bell Labs (in research and development), Zilog, and Palo Alto Research Center (PARC).
During his summers at Bell Labs, he and Mike Lesk wrote Lex, a program used in compiler construction that generates lexical-analyzers from regular-expression descriptions.
Sun Microsystems
In 1983, Schmidt joined Sun Microsystems as its first software manager. He rose to become director of software engineering, vice president and general manager of the software products division, vice president of the general systems group, and president of Sun Technology Enterprises.
During his time at Sun, he was the target of two notable April Fool’s Day pranks. In the first, his office was taken apart and rebuilt on a platform in the middle of a pond, complete with a working phone and workstation on the corporate Ethernet network. The next year, a working Volkswagen Beetle was taken apart and re-assembled in his office.
Novell
In April 1997, Schmidt became the CEO and chairman of the board of Novell. He presided over a period of decline at Novell where its IPX protocol was being replaced by open TCP/IP products, while at the same time Microsoft was shipping free TCP/IP stacks in Windows 95, making Novell much less profitable. In 2001, he departed after the acquisition of Cambridge Technology Partners.
Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin interviewed Schmidt. Impressed by him, they recruited Schmidt to run their company in 2001 under the guidance of venture capitalists John Doerr and Michael Moritz.
In March 2001, Schmidt joined Google’s board of directors as chair, and became the company’s CEO in August 2001. At Google, Schmidt shared responsibility for Google’s daily operations with founders Page and Brin. Prior to the Google initial public offering, Schmidt had responsibilities typically assigned to the CEO of a public company and focused on the management of the vice presidents and the sales organization. According to Google, Schmidt’s job responsibilities included “building the corporate infrastructure needed to maintain Google’s rapid growth as a company and on ensuring that quality remains high while the product development cycle times are kept to a minimum.”
Upon being hired at Google, Eric Schmidt was paid a salary of $250,000 and an annual performance bonus. He was granted 14,331,703 shares of Class B common stock at $0.30 per share and 426,892 shares of Series C preferred stock at purchase price of $2.34.
In 2004, Schmidt and the Google founders agreed to a base salary of US$1 (which continued through 2010) with other compensation of $557,465 in 2006, $508,763 in 2008, and $243,661 in 2009. He did not receive any additional stock or options in 2009 or 2010. Most of his compensation was for “personal security” and charters of private aircraft.
In 2007, PC World ranked Schmidt as the first on its list of the 50 most important people on the Web, along with Google co-founders Page and Brin.
Schmidt is one of a few people who became billionaires based on stock options received as employees in corporations of which they were neither the founders nor relatives of the founders, such as Meg Whitman.
In its 2011 ‘World’s Billionaires’ list, Forbes ranked Schmidt as the 136th-richest person in the world, with an estimated wealth of $7 billion.
On January 20, 2011, Google announced that Schmidt would step down as the CEO of Google but would take new title as executive chairman of the company and act as an adviser to co-founders Page and Brin. Google gave him a $100 million equity award in 2011 when he stepped down as CEO. On April 4, 2011, Page replaced Schmidt as the CEO.
On December 21, 2017, Schmidt announced he would be stepping down as the executive chairman of Alphabet. Schmidt stated that “Larry, Sergey, Sundar and I all believe that the time is right in Alphabet’s evolution for this transition.”
In February 2020, Schmidt left his post as technical advisor of Alphabet after 19 years with the company.
Personal life
In June 1980, Schmidt married Wendy Susan Boyle (born 1955 in Short Hills, New Jersey). They lived in Atherton, California, in the 1990s. They have a daughter, Sophie, and had another, Alison, who died in 2017 from an illness. A number of Schmidt’s outside relationships have attracted publicity, but he continues philanthropic efforts in the name of him and his wife.
In January 2013, Schmidt visited North Korea with his daughter Sophie, Jared Cohen, and former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson.
In 2015, Schmidt acquired a 20% stake in D.E. Shaw & Co. Schmidt is also an investor in CargoMetrics, another quant hedge fund.
In April 2015, Schmidt delivered the commencement address at Virginia Tech, located in Schmidt’s childhood home of Blacksburg, Virginia. This came on the heels of Schmidt making a $2 million donation to Virginia Tech’s College of Engineering. Schmidt’s philanthropy is the result of his longstanding friendship with Virginia Tech’s former president Paul Torgersen. His donation funded the Paul and Dorothea Torgersen Dean’s Chair in Engineering.
In September 2020, Schmidt purchased Montecito Mansion, a 22,000-square-foot estate overlooking Santa Barbara, for $30.8 million.
In November 2020, Recode reported that Schmidt is finalizing his plan to become a citizen of Cyprus. He is one of the highest-profile people to take advantage of the immigrant investor programs that offers a “passport-for-sale”. This passport can be used to enter and live in any country of the European Union
Milestones
- 1955 Eric Emerson Schmidt is born in Washington, D.C.
- 1982 PhD in computer engineering from the University of California, Berkeley.
- 1983 Becomes a software manager at Sun Microsystems.
- 1997 Appointed chairman and chief executive officer at Novell.
- 2001 Joins Google as chairman in March; later becomes CEO.
- 2004 Google sells shares in an initial public offering.
- 2011 Steps down as CEO of Google; remains chairman.
- 2015 Alphabet holding company structure is announced
