Eric Schmidt, who was chief executive of Google from 2001 to 2011, is ranked No. 60 on the Forbes 2026 World’s Billionaires list with a net worth of $35.5 billion. Since 2025 he has been CEO of the rocket maker Relativity Space.

Eric Emerson Schmidt was born on April 27, 1955, in Falls Church, Virginia, and moved to Blacksburg, Virginia. His father, Wilson Emerson Schmidt, was a professor of international economics at Virginia Tech. He graduated from Yorktown High School in 1972 and from Princeton University in 1976 with a degree in electrical engineering.

Net Worth and Rank

  • Forbes 2026 list: No. 60, with $35.5 billion
  • Other estimate: Wikipedia says the Bloomberg Billionaires Index put him at $64.3 billion in 2026

Early Career

As an intern at Bell Labs in 1975, Schmidt co-wrote Lex, a program that generates lexical analysers for the Unix operating system. In 1983 he joined Sun Microsystems, and from 1997 to 2001 he was CEO of Novell.

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Google

  • 2001–2011: CEO of Google, succeeding Larry Page as chief executive in August 2001, with founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin remaining as co-founders
  • 2011–2015: executive chairman of Google
  • 2015–2017: executive chairman of Alphabet, then technical adviser until 2020

Policy, Philanthropy and Business

  • Obama administration: he campaigned for Barack Obama in 2008 and later joined the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology
  • Schmidt Futures: he founded this philanthropic venture in 2017
  • AI policy: in 2018 he became the first chair of the US National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, and in 2021 founded the Special Competitive Studies Project, which he chairs; Wikipedia says he had a major influence on the Biden administration’s science policy, especially on AI
  • Relativity Space: since 2025 he has been the CEO of this aerospace manufacturing company
  • Sports: he owns a minority stake in the Washington Commanders

Why It Matters

Schmidt ran Google through its fastest growth and has since become an influential adviser on technology and national security.

Net worth figures change daily with share prices. Rankings here follow the Forbes 2026 World’s Billionaires list, with wealth measured on March 1, 2026.

Image: Eric Schmidt speaking at the Munich Security Conference, February 2018. Photo: Hecker / MSC / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0 de)