Eric Emerson Schmidt (CEO Google.)

Eric Emerson Schmidt (born April 27, 1955(1955-04-27)) is an engineer, Chairman/CEO of Google Inc. and a former member of the Board of Directors of Apple Inc.He also sits on the boards of trustees for Carnegie Mellon University and Princeton University.

Schmidt was born in Washington, D.C. After graduating from Yorktown High School (Virginia), Schmidt attended Princeton University where he earned a BSEE in 1976. At the University of California, Berkeley, he earned an MS in 1979, for designing and implementing a network linking the campus computer center, the CS and the EECS departments and a PhD in 1982 in EECS with a dissertation about the problems of managing distributed software development and tools for solving these problems He was joint author of lex (a lexical analyzer and an important tool for compiler construction). He taught at Stanford Business School as a part time professor.

He lives in Atherton, California with his wife Wendy.

He is also on the list of ARTnews 200 top art collectors.

The Schmidt Family Foundation addresses issues of sustainability and the responsible use of natural resources. Wendy Schmidt, working with Hart Howerton, a San Francisco architectural firm that specializes in large-scale land use, has inaugurated several projects on the island of Nantucket that seek to sustain the unique character of the island, and to minimize the impact of seasonal visitation on the island's core community.

Early in his career, Schmidt held a series of technical positions with IT companies, including Bell Labs, Zilog and Xerox’s famed Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). He joined Sun Microsystems in 1983, led its Java development efforts and rose to become Chief Technology Officer. In 1997, he was appointed CEO of Novell.

Schmidt left Novell after the acquisition of Cambridge Technology Partners. Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin interviewed Schmidt. Impressed by him, they recruited Eric Schmidt to run their company in 2001 under the influence of venture capitalists John Doerr and Michael Moritz.

Schmidt joined Google's board of directors as chairman in March 2001 and became the company's CEO in August 2001. At Google, Schmidt shares responsibility for Google's daily operations with founders Page and Brin. As indicated by page 29 of Google's 2004 S-1 Filing Schmidt, Page, and Brin run Google as a triumvirate. Schmidt possesses the legal responsibilities typically assigned to the CEO of a public company and focuses on management of the vice presidents and the sales organization.

According to Google's website, Schmidt also focuses on "building the corporate infrastructure needed to maintain Google's rapid growth as a company and on ensuring that quality remains high while product development cycle times are kept to a minimum."

Schmidt was elected to Apple's board of directors on August 28, 2006. On August 3, 2009 it was announced that Schmidt would resign his board member position at Apple due to conflict of interests and the growing competition between Google and Apple.

In 2007, Schmidt was cited by PC World as #1 on the list of the 50 Most Important People on the Web, along with Google co-Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

Schmidt was an informal advisor to the Barack Obama presidential campaign and began campaigning the week of October 19, 2008, on behalf of the candidate. He had been mentioned as a possible candidate for the new Chief Technology Officer position which Obama created in his administration.In announcing his endorsement for Obama, Schmidt jokingly said that with his $1.00 salary, he would be getting a tax cut.After Obama won, Schmidt was a member of President Obama's transition advisory board. He proposed that the easiest way to solve all of the United States' problems at once, at least in domestic policy, is by a stimulus program that rewards renewable energy and, over time, attempts to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy.


While CEO of Google in 2008, Schmidt earned a base salary of just $1, and other compensation of $508,763. He did not receive any cash, stock, or options. Schmidt is one of the few people who have become billionaires (USD) based on stock options received as an employee in a corporation of which he was neither a relative nor the founder. In its 2006 'World's Richest People' list, Forbes ranked Schmidt as the 129th richest person in the world (the ranking was shared by Onsi Sawiris, Alexei Kuzmichov, and Robert Rowling) with an estimated wealth of $6.2 billion. Schmidt earned a salary of $1 in 2006.

Schmidt was asked in an interview on CNBC whether Google's users should treat the search engine as a "trusted friend." Schmidt's reply was, in part, "Judgment matters.[...] If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place. If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines -- including Google -- do retain this information for some time… it's important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities."