Eric Schmidt the company and act as an adviser to co-founders Page and Brin. Google gave him a $100 million equity award in 2011 when he stepped down as CEO. On 4 April 2011, Page replaced Schmidt as the CEO. On December 21, 2017, Schmidt announced he would be stepping down as the executive chairman of Alphabet. While working at Google, Schmidt was involved in activities that later became the subject of the High-Tech Employee Antitrust Litigation case that resulted in a settlement of $415 million paid by Adobe, Apple, Google and Intel to employees. In one incident, after receiving a complaint
Executive compensation in the United States are part of the corporate team whose leader is the CEO. When "some directors cannot in good faith continue to support a CEO who has the support of the rest of the board", they are not recognized or even tolerated as gadflies, but "expected to step down". Authors Bebchuk and Fried postulate that the "agency" problem or "agency cost", of executives power over directors, has reached the point of giving executives the power to control their own pay and incentives. What "places constraints on executive compensation" is not the marketplace for executive talent and hard-headed calculation of compensation costs and