EX-GOOG LOTHARIO HAVING TIME OF HIS WIFE
Schmidt appears at party with Wendy after years of dating younger women
Forget Harrison Ford, Cindy Crawford, Larry David and
Steven Spielberg.
They all attended the same swank party Saturday — but all eyes were on the bespectacled 69-year-old Eric Schmidt, the married former CEO of Google who, despite years of flaunting much younger girlfriends, was seen with his wife for the first time since 2019.
Missing was Schmidt’s most recent paramour, Michelle Ritter, 30, despite the billionaire helping fund her AI startup to the tune of $100 million — the first time he is known to have invested in a girlfriend’s venture.
The Post is told that they are on the outs personally but enmeshed professionally. Her startup accelerator, Steel Perlot, is reported by Forbes to be struggling financially.
And in a further complication, Schmidt, who has an estimated fortune of $25 billion according to Forbes, has been seen escorting another woman in recent weeks, whose identity remains unknown, sources told The Post.
‘He’s been very visible’
Schmidt, who’s been dubbed everything from “New York’s hottest bachelor” to “The Adulterer in the Room” and “Uncle Sugar,” was beaming as he and his wife, Wendy, 68, whom he married in 1980, arrived at the Obamas’ White House interior designer Michael S. Smith’s star-studded 60th birthday.
Schmidt had not been seen publicly with his wife since 2019, although they released a podcast together in 2020.
Neither of the two have ever commented on what appears to be a . . . flexible relationship.
That sighting was for another starry party, this one in Beverly Hills with a guest list that included Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez, Katy Perry and Oprah.
“It’s been very well known for years that the Schmidts have this ‘arrangement,’ ” a source in Silicon Valley who has been around both Eric and Wendy for years told The Post.
“He’s been very visible all over the place with these other, much younger women. A lot of these billionaire tech bros think it’s their right.
“The fact that Eric is going for these 30-year-olds is not about having a real romance or partnership — it’s about showing off.
“The ultimate nerd trophy is to bed women who would never have paid attention to them in their first 30 years of life.”
Schmidt’s alleged past flings include fashion designer Shoshanna Gruss — who dated Jerry Seinfeld when she was a schoolgirl; socialite Ulla Parker; p.r. exec Marcy Simon; Kate Bohner, a former CNBC correspondent who now owns her own communications advisory firm; Council on Foreign Relations communications VP Lisa Shields; and pianist Cho-San Nguyen.
‘Not getting divorced’
In 2019, Schmidt gifted his thengirlfriend, Alexandra Duisberg — a blond medical school grad turned fashionista who was 32 years his junior — a huge, 10-carat pink sapphire ring that kickstarted engagement rumors. Duisberg reportedly told friends that the pair wanted kids “but his wife is making things complicated.”
Unfortunately for Duisberg, a source told The Post, she was just one of Schmidt’s many conquests who believed he would leave his wife for her.
“I’ve lost count of how many women I know that Eric has given rings to,” another source told Page Six at the time. “He’s not getting engaged because he’s not getting divorced.”
Schmidt’s dating life became public knowledge when Gawker published a photo in 2010 of him posing with Bohner at Burning Man — and looking conspicuously out of place at the bohemian festival in his powder blue shorts, pink polo and white ankle socks. The interest in his marriage heated up in 2013 when Eric purchased a $15 million duplex penthouse on West 21st Street in Manhattan and had it soundproofed.
‘She made a nice deal’
Page Six reported that he chose a building with no doorman because, according to a source, “he doesn’t want anyone to see him and his guests coming in and out.”
As for the former Wendy Boyle, who met her future husband at the International House at UCBerkeley when they were both students at the university, she has remained mum about her husband’s extracurricular activities.
Boyle, born in Orange, NJ, holds a master’s degree in journalism from Berkeley, worked briefly at Sun Microsystems, as did Eric, and then became an interior designer. The couple have two daughters, one of whom died in 2017.
Boyle took up competitive sailing at 52 and spends a lot of her time at one of the Schmidts’ many luxe residences, a waterfront compound in Nantucket.
This month the couple sold their Silicon Valley estate two weeks after listing the 3.3-acre property for $24.5 million, The Wall Street Journal reported. They also own homes in Montecito, Calif., and Miami, Fla.
Wendy is currently the president of The Schmidt Family Foundation, overseeing $1 billion in assets.
She has attended the Davos World Economic Forum with her husband in previous years, including in 2019, when a court case revealed that he also brought an unnamed girlfriend.
“She’s very prim and controlled — she’s very Oscar de la Renta, the opposite of Lauren Sanchez,” the Silicon Valley source said.
“She’s like a Wellesley wife from the 60s. I think she just made a nice deal for herself.
“This way she gets a lot more money and her name is on everything and she gets a chance to give money to these causes that she’s really passionate about, like the ocean. She was involved with these causes 20 years ago.”
While that source called Schmidt “kind of a jerk,” another Silicon Valley insider who knows both Eric and Wendy well said she always had fun hanging out with Eric.
“He didn’t want an expensive, messy divorce and so they worked this out,” she said. “They both get their freedom and I think they really do love each other. They’re family.”
‘He can’t say no’
The insider said that Schmidt can be a paradox.
“He’s obsessed with power and status and the royal family,” she said. “He’s very connected to the government. He worked with the [Department of Defense] on AI and he can be a scary guy.
“On the other hand he’s really funny and has this crunchy, goofy hippie dad kind of a vibe.”
Schmidt’s problem, she said, is “that he can’t say no. As a CEO you have to say ‘no’ a lot and he couldn’t do it. He also can’t say ‘no’ to power, status, youth and beauty.”
Schmidt’s alleged problems with saying “no” may be one reason why he gave Ritter so much money for a company that Forbes reported last fall may be in trouble.
However, a source familiar with the situation told The Post that Schmidt has seeded a lot of businesses, not just Ritter’s company.
Ritter — a 2021 Columbia Law School graduate — launched the startup accelerator the same year the two became romantically linked. She did not respond to requests for comment from The Post.
Ritter told Forbes in October 2023 that Schmidt took on the role as a “very, very active chairman” of her startup incubator in exchange for the funds, emphasizing that they “have a very typical CEO-chairman relationship.”
Whether that relationship survives the possibility that Schmidt has moved on to another woman remains to be seen.
“He’s cycled through so many I can’t remember them all,” the Silicon Valley source said. “All I can say is — he’s always liked the ladies.”