Eric Emerson Schmidt (born April 27, 1955) is a former American business executive and software engineer who served as the CEO of Google from 2001 to 2011 and the company's executive chairman from 2011 to 2015, as executive chairman of parent company Alphabet Inc. from 2015 to 2017, and Technical Advisor at Alphabet from 2017 to 2020. In April 2022, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index estimated his net worth to be US$25.1 billion. As an intern at Bell Labs, Schmidt in 1975 was co-author 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. He has served on various other boards in academia and industry, including the boards of trustees for Carnegie Mellon University, Apple, Princeton University, and the Mayo Clinic. In 2008, during his tenure as Google's chairman, Schmidt campaigned for Barack Obama, and subsequently became a member of Obama's President's Council of Advisors on Sci