Schmidt is a former chief executive officer of Alphabet, the holding company for Google, the world's largest internet search operator. He owns about 1% of the Mountain View, California-based company. Google handles about 2 trillion searches a year, employs about 180,000 people and had revenue of $307 billion in 2023.
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 67 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 a February 2024 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Schmidt owns these shares directly, through holding vehicles, family foundations and trusts. He also owns the equivalent of about 80 million shares of class C stock, according to a 2019 filing.
Schmidt has collected about $5 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 March 1, 2024 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.
Eric Emerson Schmidt was born in Washington, D.C. in 1955. After studying at Princeton University, he earned a doctorate in computer science at the University of California at Berkeley. He soon joined Sun Microsystems as the company's first software manager, and worked his way up to become Sun's chief technology officer. He left to join Novell as its chief executive officer.
In 2001, he was recruited by Sergey Brin and Larry Page to be the "grown up" at Google. The company sold shares in a public offering in 2004, mostly bypassing the Wall Street investment banks in favor of a so-called Dutch auction that opened the offering to outside bidders. Under Schmidt's watch, revenue climbed twelvefold to $38 billion and the company's Android operating system became the most widely used mobile platform in the market. He announced that he was handing over day-to-day management of the company to Larry Page in January 2011.
Active in politics, Schmidt was appointed by President Obama to serve on the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.