Eric Schmidt on its list of the 50 most important people on the Web, along with Google co-founders Page and Brin. Schmidt is one of a few people who became billionaires (in United States dollars) based on stock options received as employees in corporations of which they were neither the founders nor relatives of the founders. In its 2011 'World's Billionaires' list, "Forbes" ranked Schmidt as the 136th-richest person in the world, with an estimated wealth of $7 billion. On 20 January 2011, Google announced that Schmidt would step down as the CEO of Google but continue as the executive chairman of
Executive compensation in the United States and Exchange Commission. Since the 1990s, CEO compensation in the U.S. has outpaced corporate profits, economic growth and the average compensation of all workers. Between 1980 and 2004, Mutual Fund founder John Bogle estimates total CEO compensation grew 8.5 percent/year compared to corporate profit growth of 2.9 percent/year and per capita income growth of 3.1 percent. By 2006 CEOs made 400 times more than average workers—a gap 20 times bigger than it was in 1965. As a general rule, the larger the corporation the larger the CEO compensation package. The share of corporate income devoted to compensating the five highest-paid