Eric Schmidt

Overview

The most interesting line in Eric Schmidt’s biography right now has nothing to do with Google. In March 2025, Schmidt — who ran Google from 2001 to 2011 — took over as CEO of Relativity Space, a 9-year-old rocket startup, telling employees he had made a significant investment and taken a controlling stake in the company (TechCrunch). It is his first CEO job since leaving Google nearly 15 years earlier, and he succeeded the startup’s co-founder, Tim Ellis, who stayed on as a director on the company’s board (TechCrunch).

The move looked eccentric at first glance — a search-engine executive running a rocket company — but by mid-2026 it had a headline validation. NASA announced it was partnering with Schmidt’s Relativity Space to fly the Aeolus Mars orbiter, with launch targeted for 2028 (Scientific American). NASA administrator Jared Isaacman unveiled the partnership at a June 17, 2026 event, calling the company a “force multiplier for science” and framing it as evidence that the United States could deliver on “its promise of a new era of space exploration” (Scientific American). For a company that nearly ran out of money in 2024, a NASA Mars mission is about as dramatic a reversal as American industry offers.

The NASA Mars bet

The Aeolus deal puts Relativity in charge of flying a real planetary-science spacecraft. The orbiter carries four NASA-built instruments that will collect data on temperature, dust, wind, and clouds in the Martian atmosphere (Scientific American). NASA supports the instruments for one Mars year — about 1.88 Earth years — while Relativity maintains the spacecraft itself (Scientific American). The backdrop sharpened the significance: NASA had lost contact with its MAVEN orbiter, leaving a gap in Martian atmospheric science that Aeolus is meant to help fill (Scientific American).

Aeolus rides on Terran R, Relativity’s larger rocket, which is expected to make its debut in late 2026 (Scientific American). Terran R is a bigger machine than anything the startup has launched before, aimed at competing with SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy, and the company had already struck nearly $3 billion in launch contracts with customers in anticipation of the 2026 launch (TechCrunch).

The bet rests on a checkered recent history. Relativity is known for building rockets with unusual techniques — 3D printers, automated robots, and artificial intelligence — and in 2023 it launched its Terran 1 rocket, demonstrating that its 3D-printed technology could work (TechCrunch). Terran 1 failed to reach orbit, and a month later the startup discontinued it to focus entirely on Terran R (TechCrunch). The Long Beach-based company reportedly faced cash shortages in 2024 and struggled to raise additional funding; its earlier backers included Mark Cuban, BlackRock, and Fidelity (TechCrunch). Schmidt’s capital and experience arrived at the company’s most precarious moment — and now at its most ambitious.

The Anthropic investor

Schmidt’s other big post-Google wager was in artificial intelligence, placed years before the boom. He was among Anthropic’s first investors, having met Dario Amodei through his then-girlfriend — now his wife — whom Schmidt knew socially (Big Technology). The two talked technology while Amodei was still at OpenAI, and business when he started Anthropic (Big Technology).

Schmidt told Alex Kantrowitz he “invested in the person more than the concept,” and gave the clearest statement of his investing philosophy on record: “At this level, when you’re doing an investment like that, you have essentially no data, right? You don’t know what the revenue is. You don’t know the market. You don’t know what the product is. And so you fundamentally have to decide based on the people. And Dario is a brilliant scientist, and he promised to hire brilliant scientists, which he did. He promised to lead a very small company doing it, which he did not. Now it’s a very large company, and now it’s a normal company. I figured it would be a very interesting research lab.” (Big Technology)

The context makes the bet look even bolder than it sounds. Amodei departed OpenAI in December 2020 alongside his sister Daniela, researcher Chris Olah, Jack Clark, and a handful of others; Anthropic was born in early 2021, with its 15 to 20 employees meeting entirely on Zoom during the pandemic’s second wave and holding weekly lunches in San Francisco’s Precita Park (Big Technology). Schmidt backed a team with no revenue, no defined market, and no product — on the strength of the people.

Google: 2001 to 2011

Schmidt was brought in as the grown-up. He joined Google’s board as chairman in March 2001 and became CEO five months later, as the board pressed young founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page to hand the reins to an experienced business leader (Britannica). He led the company through its August 2004 initial public offering and through the decade when it became the defining company of the internet era (Britannica).

The product launches under his watch read like a catalog of the modern web: Google News (2002), Blogger (2003), Google Books and Gmail (2004), Google Earth and Google Maps (2005), the acquisitions of YouTube (2006) and DoubleClick (2007), and the launches of Chrome and Android (2008) (Britannica). In 2011, Page reclaimed the CEO role and Schmidt moved to executive chairman; when Google restructured as Alphabet in 2015, he became the new holding company’s executive chairman (Britannica). He stepped down in 2018 and continued as a technical advisor until 2020 (Britannica).

Before Google

Eric Emerson Schmidt was born April 27, 1955, in Washington, D.C., and raised in Blacksburg, Virginia (Britannica). He studied electrical engineering at Princeton, graduating in 1976, then earned an M.S. in 1979 and a Ph.D. in 1982 from UC Berkeley (Britannica). His early career ran through the legendary labs and companies of the personal-computer era: Xerox PARC from 1979 to 1983, then Sun Microsystems, where he rose from software manager in 1983 to vice president of software products (1985), vice president of general systems (1988), president of Sun Technology Enterprises (1991), and chief technology officer (1994), with work tied to the development of Java (Britannica). In 1997 he became chairman and CEO of Novell, the networking software company (Britannica).

Along the way he wrote some of the era’s most-read business books: The New Digital Age (2013), How Google Works (2014), Trillion Dollar Coach (2019), and The Age of AI (2021), the last with Henry Kissinger and Daniel Huttenlocher (Britannica).

What this profile does not claim

This profile does not give a net worth figure for Eric Schmidt — published estimates vary, and none was verified against a primary or audited source in this research. It does not state the exact dollar amount of his Relativity Space investment; only that he told employees he had made a significant investment and taken a controlling stake, as reported by TechCrunch. It does not disclose what NASA is paying Relativity for the Aeolus mission, which NASA has not made public. It makes no claims about his philanthropy or any AI-policy advisory work beyond the books listed above, and it does not assert that Terran R has flown — the sources cited here predate its expected late-2026 debut. The investment philosophy quoted above is Schmidt’s own account of his reasoning, not a proven investment thesis.