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 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