Eric Schmidt

University of California, Berkeley (MS, PhD) Founder and chairman, Special Competitive Studies Project Limited partner, Washington Commanders (NFL) 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.[1] He also was the executive chairman of parent company Alphabet Inc.[2][3][4] from 2015 to 2017,[1] and technical advisor at Alphabet from 2017 to 2020.[5] Since 2025, he has been the CEO of Relativity Space, an aerospace manufacturing company.[6] 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 US$64.3 billion.[7] As an intern at Bell Labs, Schmidt in 1975 was co-author of Lex,[8][9][10] 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.[11] Schmidt has been on various other boards in academia and industry, including the boards of trustees for Carnegie Mellon University,[12] Apple,[13] Princeton University,[14] and the Mayo Clinic.[15] He also owns a minority stake in the National Football League (NFL) team Washington Commanders.