At the bottom of this thread is a comment by 'AmIFirstToThink' which has been inexplicably marked "dead". It seems to be the only reply as of writing this that makes the connection of Schmidt's stepping down to his strong bets during the 2016 election.
A little-noticed WSJ piece from October would support that idea:
> [Google] Employees donated $1.6 million to her campaign, about 80% more than the amount given by workers at any other corporation, and Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt helped set up companies to analyze political data for the campaign. Mr. Schmidt even wore a badge labeled “STAFF” at Mrs. Clinton’s election-night bash.
> His support of the losing side didn’t go unnoticed among the victors. As President-elect Donald Trump was preparing for a meeting with tech executives at Trump Tower not long before his inauguration, he asked strategist Stephen Bannon whether Mr. Schmidt was “the guy that tried to help Hillary win the election,” according to someone who heard the conversation.
> “Yes,” said Mr. Bannon. “Yes, he is.”
> Google, one of the most powerful players in Washington in recent years, is now facing the consequences of its lost political clout—and is moving mountains to regain it.
A law that targeted corporate executives would have no chance of surviving the legal precedent of those two cases. It wouldn't do much to solve the problem of dollars having more influence these days than one-person-one-vote in the U.S., but hey, don't let me stop you.
If you care about democracy, you want to make it easier for individual people to spend a lot of money on politics.
As with so many regulations, it mostly benefits the people who have enough resources to work around them:
With strict limits per person, you need a huge established machine that can reach out to many individuals to get your donations rolling. Without limits, you just need to convince one eccentric billionaire. While the latter is still hard, it's still much easier done than the former.
Yes, because we want people with sufficient money to be the only ones with a voice, and we want their voices to massively outweigh the voices of everyone else. That's definitely what someone who cares about democracy would want.
> Alphabet expects that its board will appoint a new, non-executive chairman at its next meeting in January, meaning that it will join the ranks of Apple and Microsoft as major companies with non-executive chairman.
Could someone provide some context around this topic of executive/non-executive chairpersons?
> Could someone provide some context around this topic of executive/non-executive chairpersons?
An executive chairman is something of a weird beast; they are both chairman of the board and an executive employee involved in managing the firm (as an employee, they usually report to the CEO, but the CEO is accountable to the board, which the chairman, well, chairs.) The exact division of duties between an executive chairman and the CEO is different in every firm using the arrangement, I would expect.
A non-executive chairman is just the head of the board and not involved in day-to-day executive management of the firm, only oversight of management.
Chair and CEO is less weird than separate executive chairman and CEO. The executive chairman model is more analogous to if, say, the CIO or CFO was also the board chair.
Its considered best practice for corporate governance - mainly as the independent non exec chairman can hold the CEO to account on behalf of the share holders - this should have happened in the HP scandal a while back.
Wow, Peter Thiel, is annoying, to say the least. He sounds like someone who lives in a bubble that is completely decoupled from the real world. He doesn't even let anyone else make any point.
Am I even allowed to say all these without getting sued or banned?
Who they decide to appoint will only be interesting if they appoint somebody interesting, which seems unlikely. Larry Page is still running the show, and moving from an executive chairman to a non-executive chairman will probably only mean that the board has less power than they did before.
Odds are they appoint somebody politically well-connected, and that person then gets to use the "chairman of the board at alphabet" title to lobby various governments in Google's favour, rather than they appoint somebody who is going to do any serious oversight of alphabet's executives.
I think it's highly unlikely. They need to find somebody whose stature would be increased by becoming the chairman of alphabet in about the same proportion as the prestige Alphabet would gain by having that person as their chair.
Obama as their chairman would be a huge win for Google, but I feel like he probably has better things to do. As a former president, being tied to Google would only hinder him in lobbying goverments for whatever he chooses to lobby for.
Objectively speaking, he would generally be considered likable by about 47.9 [1] of the voting public. It wouldn't be unreasonable to assume that the vast majority of employees of either Alphabet or Google would agree with your assessment, and indeed likely most in the tech sector. But I'm not sure any polarizing figure would be a good fit outside of those niches.
47.9% (on average) approval rating by Americans for his job as President (and consequently positions his cabinet, Congress and his party took). It's a barometer of how Americans feel about the USG, too.
If you polled him right now across worldwide audience about his stature, it would probably be north of 70%.
For anyone wondering: there have been some rumours that Eric Schmidt has been indiscrete in the past, more specifically that he described that he had an “open marriage” and that he had relations with “exotic dancers”.
As far as I can tell, there is no reason to think that his close collaborators at Google didn’t know about and discovered something unsavoury recently. More to the point, there is no reason to think his behaviour (although offensive to some) was ever non-consensual.
It’s entirely understandable that, after more than a decade at the helm of the most incredible companies of all time, he’s stepping down to simply retire.
Given the times, the question bears being asked -- although as far as we can tell, No.
More than rumors. Apparently he had 1 of his many mistresses sign a "confidentiality agreement."[1] This is the kind of stuff Dave Chappelle used to joke about lol, in his "Love Contract" piece[2]. Can't believe someone actually did it - i.e. have the other person sign a confidentiality agreement before a consensual (sometime paid) sexual encounter.
The only thing I can think of is the timing of this announcement is perfect if you don't want any attention drawn to it.
Keep an eye our on the news tomorrow around 4pm EST. You'll see plenty of companies dropping bad news right before the holidays. By the time everyone gets back to work, they've forgotten!
It's not a reversion, it's a continued evolution. As Dworkin noted:
> Empirically speaking, sexual liberation was practiced by women on a wide scale in the sixties and it did not work: that is, it did not free women. Its purpose—it turned out—was to free men to use women without bourgeois constraints, and in that it was successful.
The hippies became Reaganites and women were allowed to participate in the economy to some extent, but that freedom also came with the expectation of sexual availability. You see it even now: suggest that maybe we should prohibit relationships between coworkers, and men flip out. The idea that we might categorically close off some spheres of life to sexual advances, so that women can work in peace and build their careers, induces apoplexy.
Where are you getting this that men flip out of they are prohibited relationships between coworkers?
I was just listening to NPR this morning where the woman speaking was saying that we need to more strongly define expectations for office behavior, but that women as well as men are against the idea of banning office relationships.
Weird though, because school/work is the most common place for couples to meet. Your opinion is another example of ivory-tower syndrome, or living in an ultra-liberal bubble.
Coworkers abstaining has more to do with risk (greater on the men’s side). Elites have always tried controlling sexual freedom and exploration because it threatens their control over literally creating future elite generations.
The sexual revolution absolutely improved women’s prospects from the Eisenhower era. Instead of forced to religious-coupling or pushed into traditional female roles, instead women were able to more freely choose their mate.
As to the sexual revolution, read Dworkin’s take on it. Her point that it is a distinctly a man-centric view of sexual freedom is prescient. It’s not just about being free to have sex whenever/with whoever you want, but also freedom to live aspects of your life without dealing with sexual advances. It’s about the freedom to go to work and have coworkers look at you as someone who can help advance their careers, or someone who they can mentor, not a potential date.
Larry and Sergey have special voting shares so its their company. In this case how much does the board really matter. Sergey and Larry can do what they want.
Have you looked at Alphabet or other big company board? One thing you will notice is that lot of board members are actually from giant investment funds (3 in case of Google, much worse for companies like Microsoft). Regardless of who owns voting shares, these investors have huge say on how things gets done.
For example, they can threaten to dump their stock or not buy in anymore. Because of small daily volumes relative to market cap even small dumping can have huge price swings in stock. For public companies, their stock is literally a currency. They use it for acquisitions, hiring and so on. These investors can reject motions in board voting and usually always want to tighten screws for short term gains.
Now you should have more understanding on why Google was forced to hire people like Ruth Porat as CFOs and why she can cut down on so many projects for "more business focus" and increase "shareholder value". Owning majority voting shares are not that useful as they were hyped up to be.
Didn't Larry and Sergey always dislike Schmidt and consider him 'adult supervision'? I remember them being quite overt about how happy they were when 'adult supervision is no longer needed' years back
A little-noticed WSJ piece from October would support that idea:
> [Google] Employees donated $1.6 million to her campaign, about 80% more than the amount given by workers at any other corporation, and Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt helped set up companies to analyze political data for the campaign. Mr. Schmidt even wore a badge labeled “STAFF” at Mrs. Clinton’s election-night bash.
> His support of the losing side didn’t go unnoticed among the victors. As President-elect Donald Trump was preparing for a meeting with tech executives at Trump Tower not long before his inauguration, he asked strategist Stephen Bannon whether Mr. Schmidt was “the guy that tried to help Hillary win the election,” according to someone who heard the conversation.
> “Yes,” said Mr. Bannon. “Yes, he is.”
> Google, one of the most powerful players in Washington in recent years, is now facing the consequences of its lost political clout—and is moving mountains to regain it.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/googles-dominance-in-washington...