WENDY Susan Schmidt is the wife of former Google CEO and tech magnate Eric Schmidt.
She is also a philanthropist and a founding member of the non-profit organisation Schmidt Futures, as is her husband who appeared at Labour’s investment summit in October 2024.
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A college romance
Wendy Schmidt (née Boyle) was born in 1955 in Orange, New Jersey, to parents who owned an interior design firm named Boyle Design Associates.
She graduated from Smith College in 1977 and subsequently attended graduate school at Berkeley.
It was at Berkeley that she met her future husband Eric Schmidt, who was a doctoral student in computer science.
The pair bonded when Wendy edited his thesis and they eventually tied the knot in June 1980.
Wendy graduated from Berkeley in 1981 with a master’s degree in journalism.
She started working at Sun Microsystems, where Eric also worked, in their marketing department.
Eventually, she left the company in 1986 and founded her own interior design company which she ran for 16 years.
Wendy’s family life
Eric and Wendy had two daughters named Sophie and Alison.
Sadly, Alison passed away in 2017 from an illness.
Sophie launches a non-profit publication covering technology stories outside of western countries, named Rest of World.
The publication has focused on electric vehicles, Chinese technology companies and artificial intelligence.
Sophie, who was born in the mid-1980s, has traveled extensively and this adventuring helped inspire her to start her company.
She has traveled throughout Asia, Africa and the Middle East and even visited North Korea with her father in 2013.
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A tech-wiz husband
Eric served as CEO of Google from 2001 to 2011, before becoming the company’s executive chairman from 2011 to 2015.
After stepping down from this role, he became the executive chairman of Alphabet Inc, Google’s parent company, from 2015 to 2017.
Then, he became the company’s technology advisor in 2017 and remained in the role until 2020.
In November 2024, he was listed as the 48th person richest according to Bloomberg Billionaires Index which listed his net worth as $35.4 billion.
Just a year earlier, Forbes Israel had estimated Eric Schmidt’s net worth as $17.2 million.
The tech magnate was seen talking to Prime Minister Kier Starmer at an investment summit in October 2024, which was part of the Labour government’s plan to promote the UK as a stable place to invest.