The hottest bachelor in NYC right now is 64 — and married.
But that’s not stopping gorgeous women from lining up to date former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who is said to be worth $13.3 billion.
In recent years, the tech bigwig has been linked with high-profile ladies including fashion designer Shoshanna Gruss, socialite Ulla Parker and Kate Bohner, a former CNBC correspondent who now owns her own communications advisory firm.
“I think there are a lot of women who date him who think they are going to be the next Mrs. Schmidt,” said one of his exes.
“But he dates a lot of women. He likes to have a ship in every port.”
Last week, Page Six reported that Eric — who has been married for 39 years and, sources say, has no plans to divorce his wife, Wendy — had presented one of his paramours, Alexandra Duisberg, with a 10-carat pink sapphire ring on a jaunt to Greenland.
“She said they were going to have five kids together and they have frozen embryos,” said an insider of Duisberg, a medical-school grad. “She said they are going to have kids whether he and his wife are divorced or not.”
But a source close to Eric disagrees.
“It was a stupid thing that he did,” said the source of Eric’s extravagant jewelry gift. “It was a friendship ring. It was not an engagement ring . . . Sometimes he treats people too well and it leads to [misunderstandings].”
Someone who is friends with both Eric and Duisberg said that Duisberg froze her eggs, not embryos, and that when she asked Eric to fertilize them, the billionaire declined.
Eric’s dating life has been the talk of the town ever since Gawker published a photo in 2010 of him posing with Bohner at Burning Man — and looking conspicuously out of place at the bohemian festival in his powder blue shorts, pink polo and white ankle socks.
The rumors heated up more in 2013 when Eric purchased a $15 million duplex penthouse on West 21st Street. Page Six reported that he chose a building with no doorman because, according to a source, “he doesn’t want anyone to see him and his guests coming in and out.”
But while various friends claim he and Wendy have an open arrangement, his relationship with Duisberg — at 32 the youngest of his alleged ladies so far — is raising eyebrows.
“You can’t be a professional business person and community member and father and also be this sort of playboy,” said an associate of Eric’s. “All of a sudden, [he] became famous and powerful and wealthy and it’s like, ‘Wait, I can date people half my age.’
“People in Silicon Valley, in general, used to hold themselves to a higher standard than Wall Street,” the associate continued.
But that’s no longer true. “Eric’s a reflection of that change,” the associate said.
Silicon Valley’s behavior may be shifting, but Eric Schmidt is steadfast when it comes to the type of women he allegedly pursues.
“They have to look like models — tall and thin,” said one executive who is friends with a few of the billionaire’s alleged exes.
“He wants to be with someone smart,” added the ex-girlfriend. “He likes to have conversations. It’s not eye candy. It’s who is interesting.”
His roster of exes reportedly includes concert pianist Chau-Giang Thi Nguyen; Council on Foreign Relations communications VP Lisa Shields; Danya Perry, the chief of litigation and deputy general counsel to billionaire Ronald Perelman; and p.r. powerhouse Marcy Simon.
Despite the women’s substantial résumés, it’s still “a pretty heavy experience to be dating him,” said the executive. Of course, there are plenty of perks to going out with the tech honcho.
According to the ex-girlfriend, Eric’s “been known to fly into various cities just for a date.”
And he once gifted Perry a pair of diamond leaf earrings costing five figures, according to a work friend of hers.
The ex-girlfriend added that the tycoon — who held CEO or chairman positions at Google and its parent company, Alphabet, from 2001 to 2017 — goes “all in” when he is courting a woman.
“He would talk, in theory, about wanting more children but it was very vague,” she said. “[After] six months, you think you’re going to be the next wife and then . . . it just sort of peters out because he disappears.”
She admitted that it took her a few months to wise up to the fact that she wasn’t the only woman Eric was seeing at the time. The Perry colleague said, however, “He was never dishonest about it.”
Despite the Ulla-Eric relationship being splashed all over Page Six in April 2017, four months later he was spotted at a Sardinia party, thrown by Italian businessman Flavio Briatore, making out with Duisberg.
“He was dating six women when he was dating Ulla,” said the insider. “That’s why she broke up with him.”
(Page Six also reported that Eric dumped Ulla for seeing hedge-funder Alex Roepers at the same time she was dating him.)
The billionaire’s brief attention span when it comes to his romantic dalliances has been the undoing of many past relationships.
“It’s incredibly intoxicating how smart he is,” said the ex-girlfriend, who is still friendly with Eric. “But then you realize, this can never be serious. He’s an absolutely lovely man, but he’s emotionally stunted.”
The tech guru grew up in Virginia, the son of a professor-father who worked at the US Treasury in the Nixon administration. He majored in electrical engineering at Princeton, then got a masters degree and Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, where he met Wendy. The couple married in 1980 and went on to have two daughters, one of whom is now 32. The other passed away in 2017.
Eric worked at various tech firms before joining Google in 2001 — a move that propelled him into a whole new stratosphere of wealth, not to mention professional and personal scrutiny.
But even Wendy’s closest friends avoid asking her about the nontraditional setup she reportedly has with her husband.
“I don’t know and I don’t think anyone knows,” said a friend of Wendy’s about the couple’s arrangement, adding that she speaks of Eric “very sweetly and lovingly. She cares about him and cares for him.”
The ex said that Eric is careful not to use words like “girlfriend” and never labels his relationship with Wendy.
“He doesn’t put monikers on things,” she said. “He wife is in his life and he doesn’t hide that.”
In an August 2012 interview with The New York Times, Wendy refused to address Eric’s alleged extramarital affairs.
“We don’t comment on that, rumors,” said Wendy, who runs the Schmidt Family Foundation, a philanthropic organization devoted to sustainability, along with Eric.
“I do live fairly independently,” she told the Times, adding that she wouldn’t want to follow her husband around the world.
“I would feel like a piece of luggage. And he wouldn’t want me to feel that way.”
The two own homes in Silicon Valley, Montecito and Los Angeles, Calif.; Nantucket and New York City. A source familiar with the Schmidt family says, “[Wendy and Eric] both travel and aren’t in the same place often. But they have a strong relationship.”
According to a second ex-girlfriend, “Everyone makes this big deal that they are still married. They are very purposefully at the place they are at. He’s not cheating on her.”
Eric met Duisberg at a party in 2017, according to the source close to him.
Photographer Ben Fink Shapiro, who dated Duisberg, calls the lithe blonde “as smart as they get. I remember being in a taxi with her and she was speaking Urdu with the cabdriver.”
Born in Guatemala, where her parents worked for the US government, Duisberg trained to be an Olympic figure skater. She switched paths after she was injured, instead attending medical school at the University of Pennsylvania — but that didn’t hold her back from jet-setting.
“She was always traveling around the world,” Fink Shapiro said. “It would be from Art Basel Miami to a yacht in Greece to a yacht in Italy to New Year’s in Tulum.”
She started her residency at Stanford in 2018, but left less than one year later for a “sabbatical to focus on her philanthropic efforts and global health work,” said a pal of Duisberg’s.
One business bigwig said she has seen Duisberg on Eric’s arm at high-profile events during the last two years.
“He’s never at any of these things with his wife. Although it’s not as though people are expecting to see her,” said the bigwig. “Most people aren’t even fully aware that they are still married because they are never together.”
But the source close to Eric says that, despite Duisberg’s presence in his life, “they are not getting engaged. And Eric and Wendy are not getting divorced.”
The close source added that there’s plenty to love about Eric — so long as you can live with never being his one and only.
“He’s not for someone just wanting to be with someone wealthy. There’s an appeal based on substance and knowledge and not just money,” the close source said. “The thing is, he spends time with people and they get obsessed.”