Eric Schmidt

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 as the company's executive chairman from 2011 to 2015. He also served as the executive chairman of parent company Alphabet Inc. from 2015 to 2017, and Technical Advisor at Alphabet from 2017 to 2020. In September 2024, the ''Bloomberg Billionaires Index'' estimated his net worth to be 32.5 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 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. 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. Provided by Wikipedia