Eric Schmidt 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 world, with an estimated wealth of US$11.1 billion. As an intern at Bell Labs, Schmidt did a complete re-write of Lex, a software program to generate lexical analysers for the UNIX computer operating system. From 1997 to 2001, he was Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Novell. From 2001 to 2011, Schmidt served
Eric Schmidt software manager. He rose to become director of software engineering, vice president and general manager of the software products division, vice president of the general systems group, and president of Sun Technology Enterprises. During his time at Sun, he was the target of two notable April Fool's Day pranks. In the first, his office was taken apart and rebuilt on a platform in the middle of a pond, complete with a working phone. The next year, a working Volkswagen Beetle was taken apart and re-assembled in his office. In April 1997, Schmidt became the CEO and chairman of the board