Eric Emerson Schmidt (born April 27, 1955) is an American businessman and former computer engineer who was the chief executive officer of Google from 2001 to 2011 and the company's executive chairman from 2011 to 2015. He also was the executive chairman of parent company Alphabet Inc. from 2015 to 2017, and technical advisor at Alphabet from 2017 to 2020. Since 2025, he has been the CEO of Relativity Space, an aerospace manufacturing company. As of 2026, he is one of the wealthiest people in the world according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index with an estimated net worth of 64.3 billion.
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. In 1983, he joined Sun Microsystems and worked in various roles. From 1997 to 2001, he was chief executive officer (CEO) of Novell. Schmidt has been 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 National Football League (NFL) team Washington Commanders.
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. In the meantime, Schmidt had left Google, and founded philanthropic venture Schmidt Futures, in 2017. Under his tenure, Schmidt Futures provided the compensation for two science-office employees in the Office of Science and Technology Policy. Schmidt became the first chair of the U.S. National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence in 2018, while keeping shares of Alphabet stock, worth over $5.3 billion in 2019. In October 2021, Schmidt founded the Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP) and has since served as its chairman. Schmidt had a major influence on the Biden administration's science policy after 2021, especially shaping policies on AI.
Early life and education Schmidt was born in Falls Church, Virginia, later moving to Blacksburg, Virginia. 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 is German-American. He 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 EECS 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; Computer Engineering, 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.Archived at Ghostarchive and the Wayback Machine: Archived at Ghostarchive and the Wayback Machine: Archived at Ghostarchive and the Wayback Machine: 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,"CEO Eric Eric Schmidt stood out because he 'was the only candidate who had been to Burning Man.'" From "Markoff and Zachary on Google"; quoted are John Markoff and Gregg Zachary. See also Business Week's "Eric Eric Schmidt, Google". from September 29, 2003: "One of the first orders of business was joining his new 20-something colleagues at Burning Man, a free-form festival of artistic self-expression held in a Nevada desert lake bed. Sitting in his office shortly after his return, tanned and slightly weary, Eric Schmidt couldn't have been happier. "They're keeping me young," he declared." 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.Null, Christopher. "The 50 Most Important People on the Web ". PC World. March 5, 2007. Retrieved March 5, 2007. 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.Alphabet's Eric Schmidt to step down as executive chairman, Reuters, via finance.yahoo.com, December 21, 2017. 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.
Department of Defense In March 2016, it was announced that Schmidt would chair a new advisory board for the Department of Defense, titled the Defense Innovation Advisory Board. The advisory board serves as a forum connecting mainstays in the technology sector with those in the Pentagon. To avoid potential conflicts of interest within the role, where Schmidt retained his role as technical adviser to Alphabet, and where Google's bidding for the multi-million dollar Pentagon cloud contract, the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI, was ongoing: Schmidt screened emails and other communications, stating, "'There’s a rule: I'm not allowed to be briefed' about Google or Alphabet business as it relates to the Defense Department". He exited the position November 2020. From 2019 to 2021, Schmidt co-chaired the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence with Robert O. Work.
Role in illegal non-recruiting agreements While working at Google, Schmidt was involved by early 2005Case 5:11-cv-02509-LHK Document 531 Filed 10/24/13 Page 26-27 "February 18, 2005 ... Eric Schmidt “got directly involved and firmly stopped all efforts to recruit anyone from Apple” in activities that later became the subject of the High-Tech Employee Antitrust Litigation case that resulted in a settlement of $415 million paid by Adobe, Apple, Google and Intel to employees. In one March, 2007 incident, after receiving a complaint from Steve Jobs of Apple, Schmidt sent an email to Google's HR department saying; "I believe we have a policy of no recruiting from Apple and this is a direct inbound request. Can you get this stopped and let me know why this is happening? I will need to send a response back to Apple quickly so please let me know as soon as you can. Thanks Eric". Schmidt's email led to a recruiter for Google being "terminated within the hour" for having adhered to the illegal scheme. Under Schmidt, there was a "Do Not Call list" of companies Google would avoid recruiting from. According to a court filing, another 2005 email exchange shows Google's human resources director asking Schmidt about sharing its no-cold-call agreements with competitors. Schmidt responded that he preferred it be shared "verbally[,] since I don't want to create a paper trail over which we can be sued later?"
Apple On August 28, 2006, Schmidt was elected to Apple Inc.'s board of directors, a position he held until August 2009.
Broad Institute Schmidt was chairman of the board of directors at Broad Institute from 2021 until 2025.
Other ventures Schmidt sat on the boards of trustees of Carnegie Mellon University and Princeton University. He taught at Stanford Graduate School of Business in the 2000s. Schmidt serves on the boards of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Khan Academy, and The Economist. New America is a non-profit public-policy institute and think tank, founded in 1999. Schmidt succeeded founding chairman James Fallows in 2008 and served as chairman until 2016.New America Foundation, Board of Directors . Retrieved May 11, 2010 Schmidt runs the family office Hillspire, which was founded in 2006. The business has invested in more than 22 AI firms since 2019, and is the number-one ranked family office as of 2026.