Eric Schmidt home of Blacksburg, Virginia. This came on the heels of Schmidt making a two million dollar donation to Virginia Tech's College of Engineering. Schmidt’s philanthropy is the result of his long standing friendship with Virginia Tech's former president Paul Torgersen. His donation funded the Paul and Dorothea Torgersen Dean’s Chair in Engineering. Eric Schmidt Eric Emerson Schmidt (born April 27, 1955) is an American businessman and software engineer. He is known for being the Executive Chairman of Google from 2001 to 2015 and Alphabet Inc. from 2015 to 2017. In 2017, "Forbes" ranked Schmidt as the 119th-richest person in the
Kowloon-Canton Railway Corporation the chairman) and the executives (led by the CEO) to suit its operational needs and the prevailing corporate practices which change over time. This deliberate lack of clarity arguably sowed the seed for a future controversy. Michael Tien, a businessman, was subsequently appointed as the chairman, with the former chairman and chief executive, K Y Yeung, stepping down to become the CEO. It rapidly became publicly evident, however, that there was personal tension between the two, exemplified by Michael Tien's denial that he was a good friend of K Y Yeung when the two briefed the media in 2002 on