If you look at the actual interview, the context is police search warrants for search data, and whether people are too blaze about making sensitive searches. From the context, it's pretty clear that the intended parsing of:
"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."
Was:
"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it [searching for that something on Google] in the first place."
Not, as that EFF article interpreted it:
"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it [that something] in the first place."
It's a warning that you really should not be assuming confidentiality from law enforcement in your use of online services, not a patronizing "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" moral judgement.
It bugs me a bit that EFF was more interested in intentionally misinterpreting the quote for cheap publicity than in curbing the use of search warrants for internet service provider data, which was still in its infancy.
This reading misses the more general issue of Google collecting and storing large amounts of data about people for its own commercial purposes thereby exposing people to search warrants directed to Google rather than to the persons themselves.
Schmidt could have answered, "No, they should not be sharing data with Google as if Google is a "trusted friend". (Was Google even notifiying people their data had been obtained by law enforcement?)
Instead he tried to suggest responsibility for the search warrant problem is with people using Google.
I have seen interviews with Google founders where they proclaimed "users trust us". I have seen this in the company's marketing copy. I have seen it in published discovery materials from the antitrust cases. Google expects that they have peoples' trust. The company wants people to let it collect data about them.
Google created this problem. This target for search warrants did not exist previously. But Schmidt refused to accept responsibiilty.
Does Google have to collect and store data long-term? No. They will provide a list of bogus reasons^1 but today, trillions of dollars in revenue later, everyone knows they do so to enrich themselves at the expense of peoples' privacy. Why would anyone trust Eric Schmidt? Because they are led to believe that they can.
Look at how Google responds to discovery requests. It is extremely secretive. Much to hide.
I don't understand marital instability when you're rich and live in a community property state. Either stay married because there's way too much to lose or stay single, but to philander and divorce is just economic suicide.
This isn't even about the wife--this is about a deal with a former mistress to keep quiet by offering her a token job as an investor at one of his companies.
She doesn't get the memo that she isn't actually supposed to do anything and suggests poorly substantiated investments and potentially does a little fraud... exhausting just reading about it, I'm not sure why I bothered.
There's no real takeaways here except he should just keep it in his pants. Definitely nothing worthwhile for this audience.
It was a lot to read through, and I don't know why we (or the NYTimes) should care, but it sure doesn't seem like "potential" fraud, and it was only "a little" because Eric Schmidt is a billionaire. She totally tried to pull a fast one (registering a company with the same name in a different state to get shares that were his to be transferred to hers). ESH here but the legal system will not look kindly on that bit of subterfuge.
The wife is paid off and fine. The problem is the troublesome girlfriends.
When there’s lots of money and ego at stake, people live their lives differently. Divorce brings acrimony and risk. The guy wants to be a playboy to fulfill whatever need he has, and seems to fritter around and make unwise choices. The spouse gets the prestige and status of being attached to the VIP, and may have her own dalliances.
High level operating people with money or power can afford to live seemingly bizarre lives. They’re just people with the same issues as everybody else, but the cash or influence allows them to make different choices, and for men think with their dick when they aren’t doing business - it’s pretty common.
Yeah, it's absurd to think that someone who probably makes roughly half a billion per year in income off his investments alone, cares about half of his net worth walking out the door.
Significant paper losses, but when you're worth >1 billion (and Schmidt is worth >25 billion) I argue that nominal dollars aren't really about money anymore. They're about power. I can't wring out a single tear for someone who's suffering the loss of going from being really, really, really powerful to merely really, really powerful.
Dividing your stock portfolio isn’t taxable as you aren’t selling anything. Also you can divide up the houses and then if one party’s assessed value is more than trivially different from the other’s, you can make up the difference in the division of the financial assets.
Most people of course have perhaps one house and many do sell it to split the asset value, but as I said in my comment we are talking about the billionaires (in Schmidt’s case) and multimillionaires where there are many more degrees of freedom.
What would he be liquidating? His wife will get some of his stock and a bunch of more liquid assets. That doesn't require 'liquidating' anything. He isn't going to sell a megayacht to 'pay for the divorce'.
You don't understand how finances work for people in his wealth class. When you have billions of dollars in net worth, at a certain point, it's pretty meaningless how much there actually is because it's pretty hard for one or two people to spend it that fast. At a certain level, it might as well be "infinity amount of money."
Then there's the investment income from such a large portfolio.
If you have $1BN in stonks and we assume they rise with the market average of about 10%, minus 3% inflation, plus we'll fudge it a bit lower just for the sake of envelope math...
...you are making $45M/year inflation adjusted off your investments.
Schmidt is worth over $20BN. If only $10BN of that is in stocks, then he's making half a billion a year. That is about $139,000 per day in investment income.
Do you think he cares that his investment returns drop to (inflation adjusted) $75k/day?
Let's assume he loses half his investment income. Let's also assume he's spending every single dime of that annual investment income. Let's also assume he doesn't change his spending after the divorce.* That means that if he lives another 30 years. At $250M/year, that's $7.5BN. Which means he'd die with $3BN in net worth. Which is enough to make $135M in income for whoever gets it.
Do you now understand?
If not, it's like this: you live in the desert. You have a tank next to your house that is your only source of water, and it gets filled every so often. Your daily consumption rate is fairly important, and that tank losing half its capacity, would be a pretty big deal, right? You're going to at least pull out a spreadsheet and run some numbers and see if you're going to make it until the next shipment. You might do your laundry a bit less, not wash your car as much.
Now, let's do the billionaire equivalent: someone lives in the pacific northwest, and their water supply comes from a 1000 acre, ~20 foot deep lake. They also have a town water supply connection.
A magic wizard comes along and shrinks the lake by half its size. Poof! 500 acres gone.
Do you think they pull out a spreadsheet to figure out if things are going to be OK? Do you think their water consumption habits change?
That's what doesn't compute. The wisdom and care required to have and keep billions requires a certain pathological, insouciant public face or internal armor. Sure sexual thrills and "love" makes most people dumber, but a big boy billionaire baller ought to have a certain de rigeuer self-control to not catch the wrong sort of complications or perhaps they should've had a discreet open relationship arrangement a priori.
The thing is… having billions doesn’t actually make you that cool or desirable to women. Maybe it’s nice on paper — like having a cool car, but it’s a condiment. I think a lot of these tech billionaires want what they didn’t have when young and suddenly the facade of it appears in the form of gold diggers… they fall for these traps where they are weak. Eric Schmidt is not a so called “baller” like Leo DiCaprio or Christiano Ronaldo — most average women don’t actually want to sleep with him.
> The wisdom and care required to have and keep billions requires…
I think this is where your logic breaks down. Many billionaires exist due to no more intelligence and ambition than the average person but to have the luck of being born in the right place and time. Many billionaires (Buffett and Gates to name two off the top of my head) have admitted that luck was the primary reason they are multi-billionaires rather than millionaires or lower.
Your "logic" is bullshit because luck doesn't exist. Capitalizing on timing, risk tolerance, excellent anticipatory judgment, self-control, and rich parents also help.
I'd imagine someone like Schmidt is a sociopath, you don't get to where he is just be being a regular "nice guy". I'm not saying he is necessarily evil, but I think it's hard for normal people to relate to people like this. Obviously risk taking is part of a lot of these types profile.
Eric Schmitt doesn’t mind all this being out in public, right? I mean, he was a huge supporter of surveillance and dismisser of privacy advocates saying “if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear”
I’m not arguing that this puts an ultimate end to that debate but what I’m hoping for is that Schmitts unwavering position of anti-privacy might get a little softer if he is humbled a bit.
I was right down the hallway from Eric for several years. When my college roommate came to visit, I joked that he'd seen something even most Googlers had never seen: Eric in his office. Whatever he was doing, it was somewhere else.
He did have a panic button in there, in case someone came to kidnap him, I guess. We went in there to look around when he moved to the special floor with the other execs (the floor ordinary people couldn't get into).
I didn't check her badge name, but I'm 99% sure I was in the same conference room in the NYC office (Tavern on the Green?) as this woman in late 2007. She had a red contractor badge, which meant she was totally not allowed to be in this super confidential presentation that somehow she had found out about. After pulling some levers and some chat exchange, the EngEDU coordinator (M. S.) in charge of the NYC room let her stay along with the engineers. Only years later I figured who she was, thanks to some other article. Never a dull day...
Why bother with confidentiality in court proceedings?
The New York Times pieced together Mr. Schmidt’s tangled history with Ms. Simon and Mr. Rundell from records of six separate litigation and arbitration cases, all of which are public. Mr. Schmidt’s name is redacted or withheld in four of the cases, but The Times confirmed his identity through people with knowledge of some of the events and by triangulating information from court filings.
I was looking for insights into Google or SV, but it's just some unexplained personal relationship dynamics, and some questionable behavior by someone not named in the headline.
Possibly unpopular take: gossip about people’s personal lives isn’t hacker news just because they worked at Google. If this article were about Ryan Gosling instead, would it be here?
I doubt he thinks he has done anything wrong, hence the hippocratic point of view on privacy. Many wealthy, "powerful", caucasian males live this duality and happily go through life committing crimes against humanity while making judgmental statements about the rest of us. I'll avoid naming names as it will be misunderstood as political by their neophytes.
