Google, that corporate riddle wrapped inside a secret decoder ring, spends a half-million dollars a year on security for its lowest-paid employee.
Of course, that lowest-paid employee is CEO Eric Schmidt, whose $1 annual salary combined with 10.7 million shares of Google stock are worth about $5 billion, give or take a buck. Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin also scrape by on the same combination of meager salary and stock, in their cases good for about $13.5 billion apiece, according to press accounts of recent company filings.
But it’s that security for Schmidt that catches the eye. It’s an aspect of the high-powered business world – and, in this case, the world of the super rich – that doesn’t get the same attention as, say, lavish meals, corporate aircraft or even personal yachts.
A half-million dollars worth of personal security says that people who know about such matters judge you (and presumably your family) to be at significant risk of significant personal harm. And while such security may not be as intrusive as Secret Service protection, it’s probably a safe assumption that it represents a big deal to Schmidt and his family.
Harm Eric Schmidt? I’ve met Eric Schmidt and a more unassuming, mild-mannered man you are unlikely to encounter. It’s difficult to imagine anyone wanting to do him harm … at least absent that $5 billion worth of stock and Google’s mindbogglingly high public profile. Which means it’s easy to imagine.
The other thought I had in reading these accounts of Schmidt’s extensive and expensive security precautions is that it might come as close as anything has come to explaining the otherwise inexplicable nutty that Google threw in the direction of a reporter in 2005 who had the audacity to Google Google’s chief executive. The resultant publishing of a few, relatively harmless personal details about Schmidt – including his home address – resulted in Google blackballing the entire C/NET news organization for a year (a sentence later reduced upon a return to sanity on the part of Google).
The overreaction made no sense then – virtually everyone’s home address is on the Internet – it’s never been publicly explained, and it still cannot be justified now.
But a half-million bucks worth of security does at least give us a start at understanding.
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