Eric Schmidt

Eric Emerson Schmidt (born April 27, 1955) is an American engineer, billionaire investor, and former chief executive of Google, whom he ran from 2001 to 2011 before serving as the company's executive chairman from 2011 to 2015 and executive chairman of its parent Alphabet from 2015 to 2017. After leaving Google's board in 2019 he reoriented his energy and fortune toward Artificial Intelligence investment and United States national-security technology policy, chairing the Defense Innovation Board and the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence while building a network of investment vehicles, the philanthropy Schmidt Futures, and the think tank Special Competitive Studies Project. He coauthored two books on AI with the former secretary of state Henry Kissinger.¹²

Google and the Fortune

Schmidt took a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Princeton University and a doctorate in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, worked at Sun Microsystems and ran the software firm Novell, then was recruited in 2001 by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin to provide what their investors at Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital called "adult supervision." He served as chief executive through the company's 2004 initial public offering and its growth into the dominant search and advertising company in the world, stepping into the executive chairman role in 2011 when Page resumed the chief-executive title.¹

The bulk of Schmidt's wealth derives from his roughly one-percent economic interest in Alphabet. According to a February 2025 securities filing he held about 49 million Alphabet Class A and Class B shares, and an analysis of company filings found he had collected roughly 7.9 billion dollars from sales of Google stock over the years. His net worth has been reported in a wide range depending on method and timing, commonly cited near 30 to 40 billion dollars and placed higher by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index as Alphabet's share price climbed through 2025 and 2026.²

The Pentagon Advisory Boards

In March 2016 Defense Secretary Ash Carter appointed Schmidt to chair the newly created Defense Innovation Board, an advisory body bringing Silicon Valley figures to the Pentagon; he led it until 2020. The board's recommendations preceded the creation of the Pentagon's Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, the department's adoption of agile software practices, and a set of AI ethical principles for the military. Schmidt remained a major holder of Alphabet stock throughout, and the Tech Transparency Project reported that his suggesting of technologies and vendors to the Pentagon stirred the concern of at least one government ethics official.³

In 2018 Schmidt was named chairman of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, a congressionally chartered body cochaired with the former deputy defense secretary Robert Work, which ran until 2021. Its March 2021 final report concluded that the United States was not prepared to defend against or compete with China in AI and urged that the Defense Department and intelligence community become "AI-ready" by 2025. CNBC reported in October 2022 that roughly five months after his appointment Schmidt made a seed investment in an AI logistics startup named Beacon, the first of several direct investments in AI companies he made during his commission tenure, while continuing to hold billions of dollars in Alphabet stock; government ethics advisers told the network the arrangement presented a significant conflict of interest, though there was no indication he broke any rule.⁴⁵

The Investment Vehicles

Schmidt invests through several entities: the venture firm Innovation Endeavors, the earlier Tomorrow Ventures, and his family office Hillspire LLC, which manages his fortune and from which his AI startup investments have been tracked. CNBC reported in January 2025 that his family-office apparatus had backed 22 private AI firms since 2019. Among his national-security holdings is Rebellion Defense, an AI defense-software company launched in 2019 with backing that included Innovation Endeavors.²³

His firms also hold positions in companies that profit from the emerging technologies he advocated to the government, including 5G and quantum computing, and he is executive chairman of the AI investment firm Steel Perlot. In 2021 Schmidt's foundation money helped seed America's Frontier Fund, a public-private investment vehicle modeled on the CIA arm In-Q-Tel of the kind his own commission had recommended, run by the former In-Q-Tel chief executive Gilman Louie and staffed partly by former Schmidt Futures personnel. His charitable money also flowed toward China: while chairing the AI commission, his private foundation put nearly 17 million dollars into a fund feeding the Chinese private-equity group Hillhouse Capital, which holds an extensive portfolio of Chinese AI companies.³⁴

The Anthropic Investment

Schmidt was an early backer of the AI company Anthropic, founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers from the Effective Altruism milieu. His name appears among the participants in Anthropic's first outside round, the 124-million-dollar Series A announced in May 2021 and led by the Estonian programmer Jaan Tallinn, alongside Dustin Moskovitz, the investor James McClave, and the Center for Emerging Risk Research. The investment placed Schmidt in the company before the strategic stakes later taken by Google and Amazon carried its valuation into the hundreds of billions of dollars.⁹

The Series A was a small fraction of Schmidt's broader AI footprint. Through Hillspire and Innovation Endeavors he accumulated positions across dozens of AI companies, and his backing of a safety-focused lab like Anthropic sat alongside investments in defense and logistics AI firms that sell to the government, several made while he chaired federal AI advisory bodies.²⁹

The OSTP Salary Controversy

A March 2022 Politico investigation by Alex Thompson reported that Schmidt Futures had quietly paid the salaries of staff working inside the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy under its director Eric Lander, President Joe Biden's science adviser. Schmidt Futures' chief innovation officer Tom Kalil remained on Schmidt's payroll for four months while serving ostensibly as an unpaid consultant at the office, and the philanthropy indirectly paid the salary of the office's chief of staff Marc Aidinoff for about six weeks. More than a dozen people in the roughly 140-person office had ties to Schmidt.⁶⁷

The arrangement alarmed the office's general counsel Rachel Wallace, who raised what reporting described as significant ethical concerns given Schmidt's financial interests in AI and other areas overlapping the office's work. Lander resigned in February 2022 after a separate Politico report found credible evidence he had bullied Wallace and violated workplace standards. Schmidt called the salary story "largely false," saying its thesis of undue influence over the office was "unsubstantiated."⁶⁷

The Kissinger Books

Schmidt coauthored two books with Kissinger framing AI as a force reshaping geopolitics and human self-understanding. The Age of AI: And Our Human Future, written with Kissinger and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer scientist Daniel Huttenlocher, was published in November 2021. Its central argument was that AI represents an epochal shift in human affairs comparable to the printing press and the Enlightenment.⁸

The sequel Genesis: Artificial Intelligence, Hope, and the Human Spirit, written with Kissinger and the former Microsoft research chief Craig Mundie, was published by Little, Brown on November 19, 2024, nearly a year after Kissinger's death in November 2023 at age 100, making it the statesman's final book.⁸