How Google's executive chairman is gaining a reputation as a playboy, thanks to a deleted Instagram account, a £9.4 million Manhattan penthouse and his very own superyacht.
What happens when you Google the man who runs Google? Schmidt happens, that's what.
As in: Eric Schmidt, the internet company's 58-year-old executive chairman - a man whose circular glasses, boiled-ham complexion and shapeless black suits make him look more like a mid-level Scandinavian architect from 1986 than one of the richest men on earth.
Schmidt is everywhere online.
Type his name into the site over which he presides, and the bots and spiders that toil beneath the surface of the web will present you with thousands of blandly identical images of his corporate head shot, along with some extraordinary details about the Washington-born, married-with-kids programmer who spends much of his time circling the globe in his Gulfstream V jet.
Details like his £5bn of personal stockholdings, for example. Or his recent visits to Number Ten Downing Street - where he has a place on David Cameron's business advisory group - and to one of Kim Il-sung University's computer labs in North Korea. Not to mention the Bermudan tax-avoidance scheme he helps operate as a member of Google's board of directors - the company paid just £11.2m to HM Revenues &
Customs last year on an estimated £3bn of UK revenues - and his now-infamous statement that: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."
Of all the above, of course, it has been the Google chairman's radical view of privacy rights - or our lack thereof - that has transformed him from anonymous mega-nerd to a kind of Big Brother figure for the post-iPhone age.
Schmidt has boasted that "we can more or less know what you're thinking about", that "we can suggest what you should do next", and opined that everyone in the future should change their name on reaching adulthood to escape the undeletable indiscretions of their teenage years. The last was a joke, he has since claimed, although it's hard to blame anyone for taking him seriously. This is, after all, the man who brought us Street View maps, video-enabled glasses and software that can use our profile pictures in adverts targeted at our friends.
But since the mid-Noughties, in an irony so large it can probably be viewed from one of the asteroids that Google soon hopes to mine (on which more later), Schmidt has found himself a victim of the same kind of privacy-obliterating tools that his company has spent 15 years developing.
There has been speculation about his sound-proofed penthouse apartment in the heart of Manhattan.
Racy images of bikini-topped young females from a now-closed Instagram account. And, bizarrely, an account of the Google chairman's 2007 road trip to the Burning Man festival in Nevada, during which he had a screaming argument with Apple founder Steve Jobs on a desert payphone, and was later photographed amid the acid heads and techno freaks dressed in a red neckerchief and a pair of Breaking Bad-style lab goggles.
All of which couldn't have come at a more sensitive time for Google, given that its share price has just blown past the psychologically important $1,000 mark, in large part due to the salivation of investors over the very same services that have so enraged Schmidt's critics.
At the time of writing, Schmidt was maintaining an uncomfortable silence on the increasing clamour over his not-so-private life. But his wife of 33 years, Wendy (with whom he has two grown-up daughters, Allison and Sophie), speaking to a New York Times reporter from her home on the billionaires' island of Nantucket, off the coast of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, said that "some couples are very much in each other's space all the time. [But] in our case, we are both busy."
Pressed if she and her husband have an open marriage, she added: "We don't comment on rumours. People will write things. You just have to ignore them."
To which the press has responded by continuing to write things.
Even Rupert Murdoch, founder and chairman of News Corp - whose mischief-making New York Post tabloid has been all over Schmidt's alleged womanising since last July - has done his bit. Back in October, the mogul was asked by a fellow user of Twitter to "expose" the Google chairman. "Just wait!" was his reply.
Murdoch, it should be noted, later backed away from this taunt. ("Oops!" he wrote. "Better ignore last tweet.") Schmidt, after all, has some well-connected friends, including one Barack H Obama.
Schmidt is so close to the United States president, in fact, that he spent election night in November 2012 with Obama's data analytics team in "the Cave", their disco-ball-decorated headquarters in a nondescript office block in Chicago.
Many believe it was Schmidt and this crack unit of genius-IQ programmers who ensured Obama's pundit-defying five-million-vote margin of victory - largely due to their ability to predict where campaign resources needed to be targeted before polling booths closed.
The Google chairman, in other words, is someone that even the richest men in the world don't want as an enemy. "The truth is, Google is more powerful than a lot of governments," argues Alexander Hanff, a Blackpool-born privacy advocate, who recently sued Google for the token sum of £399.95 over changes to its data-sharing policy. "They certainly have more wealth [£34bn at the last count] than many of the poorer countries in the world." And then, of course, there's the matter of Google's near-omniscience. "You might have forgotten what you did at, say, 9am on 17 July back in 2011,"
Hanff says. "Google hasn't. It knows more about you than you know about yourself."
But how did Schmidt end up in such a Blofeldian position?
The answer, unsurprisingly, is a mixture of upbringing and luck.
One of three German-American brothers, he grew up in Virginia with an economics professor father who worked at the US Treasury under the Nixon Administration. At high school he was a champion long-distance runner. After that he won a place at the Ivy League university Princeton, where he switched from architecture to electrical engineering, before moving to another elite institution - Berkeley in northern California - where he earned his PhD in computer science. It was at Berkeley that he also met his wife, Wendy, a graduate student in journalism.
They married in the summer of 1980.
Schmidt's first big job was at Sun Microsystems, the company behind the Java programming language. His time there was arguably most notable for an April Fools' prank that resulted in his entire office - including a working telephone - being relocated to a platform in the middle of a pond. From Sun he went to Novell, a troubled networking software company whose products were facing obsolescence. According to one former colleague quoted in Forbes, Schmidt made his mark by reprimanding Novell's sales team for cheering when the US Justice Department declared Microsoft to be a monopoly.
They should be ashamed of themselves, said Schmidt, for ever allowing a competitor to become so big and so strong.
It was this kind of testosterone-spitting attitude that so appealed to Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page when they were looking for someone to provide "adult supervision" as they turned their four-year-old search directory into a viable business. They appointed Schmidt CEO in 2001, and a few months later, had reported their first profit. For most of the rest of the decade, Schmidt would take a salary of only $1 a year. But he would also collect enough stock options to give him a bank balance in the billions - a rare feat for a non-founder of a company - while being rewarded with prestigious directorships elsewhere, including a seat on Apple's board.
By 2007, however, the first gossip about Schmidt's alleged female indulgences began to circulate. A blonde PR called Marcy Simon - her Twitter handle is @teflonblondie - had been spotted on his yacht in the French Riviera wearing what appeared to be a large yellow diamond engagement ring. The theory at the time was that Schmidt was already separated and preparing for a divorce.
This wasn't so, however. In fact, Wendy Schmidt had just helped set up a £110m family foundation, and the Google chairman was still paying visits to her in Nantucket. (Their house on the island, it has been observed, has privacy hedges that stand three metres high.) And then Schmidt was seen with yet another woman, Kate Bohner (it's pronounced Bonner, not Boner), a wild-living ex-TV reporter who'd once co-authored a book with Donald Trump and was the ex-wife of the bestselling Moneyball author Michael Lewis.
This, alas, is where things got messy. "Eric just emailed her out of the blue, said I've been following your career, let's meet up," recalls Jason Parsley, a journalist based in Florida, and one of Bohner's close friends. (Bohner declined to talk to GQ, and Parsley said he was not speaking for her.) "It's as though he becomes infatuated with people, and he's so powerful and wealthy, he can just make it happen."
Being the girlfriend of the man who commands a website used by practically every human being in the western hemisphere certainly has its advantages.
One of Schmidt's first gifts to her was a priceless iPhone prototype, supplied by Steve Jobs. Schmidt didn't want it for himself, apparently, because he couldn't stand the touch-screen keyboard. Besides, he was working on a secret rival, code-named the "G-phone", later to become the Android/Nexus family of devices. "From what I know, it was basically an open relationship, but they had certain rules, like no photographs in public," says Parsley. "Kate was in love, though. Head over heels. She even moved to LA to be on the same coast as Eric."
Bohner went public with her blog, Recovery Girl 007, in which she detailed an affair along with her own struggle with drugs, which included once snorting cocaine in Hyde Park. At around the same time, reports and photographs emerged of the couple's visit to Burning Man, where Schmidt apparently refused to sleep in a tent, instead choosing to make a two-and-a-half-hour commute to a hotel in Reno. Schmidt's phone argument with Jobs also leaked out in excruciating detail. According to one unnamed source, the signal on Schmidt's BlackBerry kept dropping, hence the need to use a landline at a convenience store in the middle of the desert. Jobs had just found out about the G-Phone and was beyond livid. Schmidt "visibly lost his composure" as he took the epic bollocking from Cupertino, said the source. "His face went weird."
Taken in broader context, the episode paints a rather lonely portrait of Schmidt, who is almost 20 years older than Google's two richer - and far cooler - founders.
Indeed, it's said that Brin and Page often leave Schmidt out of their plans, even though it was supposedly their common love for Burning Man that helped bring them together in the first place. Brin reportedly didn't even invite Schmidt to his 2007 marriage to Anne Wojcicki in the Bahamas. (They are now separated.) And of course two years ago Page replaced Schmidt as CEO, leaving him in his current position of chairman and the public face of anti-Google criticism.
Meanwhile, Steve Jobs - whom Brin and Page idolised - kicked Schmidt off Apple's board with a brutal press release stating: "Eric's effectiveness as a board member will be significantly diminished since he will have to recuse himself from even larger portions of our meetings due to potential conflicts of interest." It was a painful moment for Schmidt, who'd always looked up to Jobs, and had tried many times - if the rumours are correct - to get invited over to his house for a man-date dinner.
It's lonely at the top, for sure.
But Schmidt's curious position as a financial peer of many of the world's leading entrepreneurs - yet not really one of them due to his non-founder status - has surely made it only lonelier still.
Bohner's blog has since disappeared, supposedly under pressure from Schmidt's lawyers. But more stories of alleged girlfriends supposedly keep emerging as Wendy remains on Nantucket, protesting that she would "feel like a piece of luggage" if she tagged along with her husband on his yacht or private jet.
The latest burst of gossip came last summer, when the Page Six column in the New York Post linked Schmidt to two women: Lisa Shields, an attractive single mother and executive on the Council On Foreign Relations think-tank; and the striking Vietnamese pianist Chau-Giang Thi Nguyen, ex-fiancée of the Oscar-winning producer Brian Grazer.
The Post also revealed that Schmidt was the mystery buyer of a £9.4m penthouse at 31 West 21st Street in Manhattan, better known as the home of Shia LaBeouf's character in the Oliver Stone movie Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. Bigger than many family homes in the suburbs, the apartment has four bedrooms, a "floating" staircase, a walk-in bar, a private lift that can't be operated without a key, and a massive wrap-around roof terrace with head-on, unobstructed views of the Empire State Building. It has been said that Schmidt likes the apartment because it doesn't have a doorman - an oddity in that price-range in Manhattan - and that he has paid millions to have the place soundproofed because "he doesn't sleep well". Bloggers have, of course, leapt all over these last two allegations, although in fairness, soundproofing an apartment in Manhattan's Flatiron District would hardly be unusual.
As if all this weren't enough to ram home the image of Schmidt as a cross between Hugh Hefner and a James Bond supervillain, the Google chairman also owns a £45m yacht, Oasis, which features a pool and a gym that turns into anocean-bound nightclub.
Meanwhile, Gawker Media blog Valley Wag managed to locate what it claimed to be Schmidt's private Instagram account, gaining access to the list of people he was following. The images of oiled and tanned females in hula skirts and other items of beachwear that emerged could hardly have been further removed from the old, white and very male technology bloggers and venture capitalists he keeps tabs on via Twitter.
The account, needless to say, now directs to a "Page Not Found".
While some are concerned that the media stalking of Schmidt might have gone too far, sympathy for the Google chairman is nevertheless a scarce commodity. "I would defend anyone's right to privacy, whether it's Eric Schmidt's or David Cameron's," says Alexander Hanff. "At the same time, you can see the irony. These systems that he's been involved with have made him vastly wealthy - and now, here they are, being used against him."
Kate Bohner's friend Parsley has a slightly different take. "He was pissed off," he claims. "But also he has the power and money to stop people from talking. Your average person can't do that. So it's not exactly a level playing field, is it?"
Schmidt isn't the first technology billionaire to live like a king, of course. Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, is the owner of a fighter jet, competes in deadly yacht races, and once hired craftsmen in Japan to build him a home which was then dismantled and reassembled on his estate in California. Oh, and he recently bought Hawaii - or rather, the entire island of Lanai - for about $500m. Even Bill Gates has had his moments of mogul excess: he successfully lobbied to change American law so he could legally import his beloved Porsche 959 supercar.
In theory, therefore, it should hardly matter that Schmidt is enjoying the freedoms that come with great wealth. Google, after all, is a deeply quixotic venture to begin with. The company and its founders want to mine asteroids for precious metals. They're trying to grow hamburgers in labs. They even recently invested in "everlasting life".
With sex, however, comes complications. Just ask Tiger Woods. Or Boris Johnson. Or the unfortunately named former New York mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner. The risk can be especially high if the woman in question stands to lose more from the relationship ending than she does from going public - as happened with Weiner's ex-sexting partner Sydney Leathers, who launched a porn career based on her infamy, inflicting fatal damage to Weiner's poll numbers. "Being a mistress has definitely become a business," says Gina Rodriguez, a Los Angeles-based agent for spurned lovers, including one of Woods' former girlfriends and the aforementioned Leathers. "Women are smarter these days. They're videotaping sex, recording phone calls, taking photos with their smartphones, saving voicemails and texts and even hotel-room keys. Anything to document the affair and how long it went [on for]. The women have the option to go to the media, where any proof they have compiled can be worth quite a bit of money and be the start of a new career."
But what if a mogul's girlfriends sign non-disclosure contracts? "They mean nothing, because really they're just another piece of evidence of the affair," shrugs Rodriguez.
If the Schmidts really do have an open marriage, of course, they may see no harm in any further revelations along the lines of Bohner's blog. Any efforts at suppression, however, are likely to be viewed as hypocrisy from a man who says he believes in a radically more open society - which in turn could prove to be a distraction from Google's ever-expanding operations. What's more: because Schmidt's business adversaries include media owners - who have long regarded Google's "content aggregation" business model as fundamentally parasitic - any girlfriends out there will almost certainly be found.
This surely wouldn't be good news for someone who is still essentially an employee of Google, serving at the pleasure of the controlling shareholders - ie, Brin and Page.
A divorce, on the other hand, could put an end to all such problems, although with Schmidt having been married to the same woman for three decades, it could also break all financial records. If current estimates are accurate, "half of everything" would amount to £2.5bn.
And that, even for the man who runs Google, is a Schmidt load of cash.
Chris Ayres is the author of War Reporting For Cowards and Death By Leisure. Follow him on Twitter at @ayreslive
Originally published in the January 2014 edition of British GQ.
